


refractory

by Griftings



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fluff and Smut and Humor and Angst, M/M, Multi, Other Relationships Not Mentioned in Tags, Past Underage mentioned frequently, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Unhealthy Relationship becomes Unhealthy Polyamory becomes Healthy Polyamory, canon-typical ableist language, romantic dramedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-01-25 15:34:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 39,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18577387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griftings/pseuds/Griftings
Summary: Normally, when two people break up, they fight. They scream, or they cry, or maybe they throw things at each other depending on the hows and whys of the split. One of them packs up and leaves, or maybe they both leave, and maybe they’re both angry and maybe they both mourn but, hopefully, eventually they both move on.Arya Stark has made a lifelong habit of doing the opposite of what’s expected of her, so when she and Gendry break up, she doesn’t kick him out of the townhouse even though the lease is in her name, and she keeps living with him.Or, the romantic dramedy wherein Gendry does everything possible to not address his latent daddy issues and really just wants to paint, Jaqen deals with Westerosi prudishness and should probably focus more on his job, and Arya has a one night stand that doesn’t actually end and accidentally busts up an international crime ring with the help of her ex-boyfriend and the aforementioned one night stand. Also, there’skind ofa love triangle-- but only in the most technical sense, and everyone involved is pretty on board with it in the end.Alternatively titled,Arya Stark Has Her Cake and Eats It Too, a Novel.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> i got nothing.  
> been in the works for a hot second. characterization is mostly book-based, with show flavoring, except how i imagine that to translate in a modern-day westeros. working update schedule is every two weeks. hopefully.

Normally, when two people break up, they fight. They scream, or they cry, or maybe they throw things at each other depending on the hows and whys of the split. One of them packs up and leaves, or maybe they both leave, and maybe they’re both angry and maybe they both mourn but, hopefully, eventually they both move on.

Arya Stark has made a lifelong habit of doing the opposite of what’s expected of her, so when she and Gendry break up, she doesn’t kick him out of the townhouse even though the lease is in her name, and she keeps living with him. Sometimes looking at him makes her want to  _ scream _ , but he’s a fair roomie and he pays his half of the rent on time every month and she’s already put so much effort into teaching him to not drink milk straight from the carton. Besides, Nymeria likes him, sort of, as much as Nymeria is capable of liking anyone who isn’t Arya; she likes him enough that she’ll deign to take a shit for him when he takes her on walks, which is more than she’s liked any of the dog sitters Arya’s hired for her in the past.

Also, Arya’s mother hates it, which is a definite bonus. (Admittedly, Catelyn wasn’t a huge fan of the fact that Arya had a live-in boyfriend to begin with, or honestly of Gendry as a person in general, but now that they’ve split it chafes Cat’s bum that he still lives there, which to Arya is basically a reason to keep her ex around indefinitely.)

Of course, it’s not like it’s  _ easy _ . At least, not at first. At first it’s all tip-toeing on eggshells and treating every conversation like a timebomb, and it’s grating and exhausting and Arya  _ hates _ it because she hates  _ him _ , or at least she really, really wants to and hates the fact that she can’t. And Gendry is stupid and stubborn because he’s  _ Gendry _ , so  _ of course _ he is, so at first the only one in the house who isn’t unhappy is Nymeria, and that’s because Nymeria is a fucking dog. In fact, Nymeria is probably even happier for it, since Gendry moves out of the bedroom and onto the couch and she can take his spot on the bed curled up against Arya’s back again.

And then, after some time passes, after the dust settles and the two of them spend the appropriate amount of time picking each other raw and being shitty to each other, they figure out how to be friends again, which is honestly all Arya ever really wanted from Gendry in the first place. Just, like, a friend. It’s not her fault he fell in love with her, but it’s  _ definitely _ his fault that she sort of loved him back. She didn’t ask for any of that. That wasn’t a responsibility she’d wanted. Anyway, Gendry puts a bed in his work room and moves off the couch, and the den becomes a space they can share instead of an awful mash of what’s  _ his _ and what’s  _ hers _ and what used to be  _ theirs _ , and they can go back to playing shitty video games together. He still tries to sneak milk straight from the carton and she still leaves her hair all over the shower wall and they both still argue with each other over who’s turn it is to take Nymeria out this time. They even still have sex sometimes, when they're drunk or lonely or bored. It’s not a relationship anymore, not really, and for her that’s fine because she hadn’t really been wanting one of those to begin with.

As for Gendry, well. He's had a long time to learn that it usually doesn't matter what  _ he _ wants; Arya has a tendency to get her way regardless.

* * *

Saying goodbye to Jon always sucks. Prying Nymeria away from Ghost usually sucks more. She promises her brother she’ll visit more often, congratulates him for about the sixth time on finally finishing grad school, and then sets to the task of literally dragging her dog away from his. Nymeria puts on the brakes and nearly slips out of her harness before giving up and sullenly following. Even the bus ride, which Nymeria usually loves, doesn’t cheer her up and the Malinois pouts the entire way down from Castle Black and won’t acknowledge Arya when the shuttle stops at Queenscrown, which boasts the largest (and only) commercial airport north of Winterfell, where she’s supposed to board a plane bound for Harrenhal in three hours. Assuming, that is, she can drag her fool dog off the Castle Black public shuttle they’ve been riding in since very early this morning.

“To me, Nymeria,” Arya says for the third time, tugging lightly on the leash. Nymeria hunkers down into the shuttle seat and stares out the window. The driver waits impatiently at the door, and Arya sends him an apologetic smile that comes out as more of a grimace.

When she finally manages to pull her bratty dog off the bus and wrestles her into her vest, Queenscrown’s airport is relatively quiet, and checking her luggage is easy. She shows the appropriate people the appropriate identification, gets a soft-baked pretzel to split with Nymeria as a bribe (“Hot Pie’s are better,” she tells her dog with a mouthful of bread, and Nymeria predictably says nothing and doesn’t seem to care much either way), and settles into a seat at the terminal to wait to board. She slips her earphones in, connects to the complimentary wifi, puts on a true crime podcast to listen to and plays a puzzle game on her phone while Nymeria lays at her feet, chin resting on her paws and golden eyes watching everyone that walks by curiously. 

She’d made sure to get there early so she could walk Nymeria around the airport for a while to try to get out the pup’s extra energy before she had to board a plane, so the two of them watch as the seats fill up around them, other passengers arriving to wait as well. People give her a wide berth because of the dog, so the seat to her right remains empty even as the other chairs are claimed, leaving her alone as she sits at the far end of the aisle of seats. People who don’t know each other smile awkwardly and apologetically as they’re forced to sit together, and Arya is, as always, glad for the privacy that having a very large dog awards her. It’s always like this in the smaller airports, where the planes aren’t as big and they have to pack a lot of people into a little space. Arya’s made the trip to and from Castle Black a handful of times now, enough that she’s gotten used to the hustle and bustle of the commute. This is only the second time she’s brought Nymeria with her, though.

Two kids, herded by their harried looking parents who are juggling a sniffling infant back and forth between them, stare at Nymeria with wide eyes and Arya bites down on a smirk. The two whisper back and forth between each other for a few minutes before the older boy, perhaps six or seven, shoves his younger brother towards her. As he approaches nervously Arya takes out one of her earphones and smiles at him; Nymeria doesn’t move anything but her eyes, which tracks his progress towards them.

“Hi,” the boy says weakly, fiddling with the hem of his shirt. “We were wondering, could we-- could we pet your dog?”

Arya, having guessed what he was going to ask, has already prepared herself for the way his face falls sadly when she says, “Sorry, bud, no can do. See her vest?” Obediently, the boy looks down at Nymeria and his mouth moves silently as he reads the broad text printed across the side of the red vest that says  _ SERVICE DOG _ . “That means she’s doing her job, so she can’t play right now.” (Arya bought the vest off the internet and had Gendry forge a doctor’s signature on the emotional support animal application because she’s a trash garbage person and Gendry has shit handwriting like a doctor anyway, but what little kids and airport officials don’t know won’t hurt them. The vest means she can have Nymeria board with her and not be stuck in a crate in the cargo hold. It also means that she can have an excuse to not let people crowd her dog, because even though Nymeria is very tolerant of strangers coming to pet her she doesn’t particularly like it.)

The boy nods solemnly, which is a better reaction from kids she’s gotten in the past. “She’s a good dog,” he tells Arya, and she grins at him.

“Yeah, she is.”

The interaction is cute and leaves her with a smile, which she manages to hold onto through the  _ second _ time another kid comes up to ask, and then loses on the  _ third _ time when a toddler tries to ignore her firm answer and pet Nymeria anyway only to be whisked away, crying, by her mother, who grimaces at Arya and apologizes profusely. Nymeria is a good sport about the whole ordeal, merely flicking her ears back and forth and moving slightly to rest her chin on the top of Arya’s shoe, but by the time a  _ fourth _ person approaches her a little less than an hour before they’re supposed to board Arya’s patience is frayed to the point where she doesn’t even look up from her phone or take her earphones out until she realizes that whoever it is isn’t going away. After staring at their shoes (men’s boots, the thick-soled kind that look like combat boots that everyone north of Last Hearth wears to keep their toes from freezing off) for a long moment and not acknowledging them, they clear their throat and Arya finally looks up, a sharp reprimand on the tip of her tongue.

A man stands in front of her, thumbs tucked into the pockets of his jeans. He’s one of few people in the terminal, herself included, that isn’t bundled up in so many jackets as to look like an overstuffed marshmallow, and wears only a dark grey heavy wool peacoat and a lighter grey scarf as a concession to the cold weather. His hair is shoulder length and mostly brown, but with enough naturally red highlights that Sandor would still call him a ginger twat and then spit on the ground, except for a streak of white at one of his temples. The effect is striking, but maybe not as striking as his sharp blue eyes, or the way his lips tilt up at one corner into an expression that’s half apologetic smile, half knowing smirk, like he’s used to getting an appreciative doubletake and had been expecting it. Arya blinks a couple times, then says what she’d prepared to say before realizing that the interrupting bastard was handsome.

“No, you can’t pet her, she’s working.”

The man’s eyebrows raise and his smile becomes decidedly  _ less _ apologetic and more of a smirk. “How forward! A man had not intended on petting a girl, but he hopes that whatever she is working on she is doing a good job. Perhaps he could merely sit?” He gestures to the chair to the right of her, and after a moment of looking around Arya realizes it’s the only one left available as passengers have filled all the rest. “A man would hate to disrupt a lovely girl’s work, but he also does not wish to sit on the floor.”

Arya gapes up at him. The way he’s talking is weird, but in a familiar way… didn’t she learn about something like this in high school? Some island across the Narrow Sea where people butchered conventional Common grammar and only referred to themselves in the third person or something? “Oh,” she says finally, like an idiot. “Oh, uh, yeah, sorry. I’d meant-- sorry, yeah, you can sit.” The man smiles at her and dips his head in thanks, and takes off his backpack and sets it on the ground to the side before dropping into the seat to her right with a sigh. Lys? No, too far south, she remembers now that she’s thinking about it. Definitely started with an L, though. It was the big island close to Braavos, Syrio would mention it sometimes…  _ Lorath! _ Yes, alright, Lorath. So he was Lorathi. And Lorathi don’t speak of themselves directly. Right.

“I was talking about my dog,” she blurts to him a minute or so after he’s sat down and settled himself in, and he lifts his eyes from the book he’d retrieved from his backpack to look at her curiously. “When I said you couldn’t pet her, I meant my dog.”

He blinks at her and then that smirk is back in full force, warm and bright and mischievous.  _ Fuck, that’s just rude _ , she thinks to herself weakly. He’s older than her, but like a hot kind of older, maybe a few years shy of forty but fit despite that. When he speaks again, his voice is gleeful, and he brushes aside some of the hair that’s fallen into his face. “So a dog denies petting, but a girl does not? A man has surely chosen the right seat.”

She decides immediately that she hates him. The glare she sends him is venomous and when he lets out a bark of laughter she can feel her cheeks heat up traitorously.

“A man apologizes,” the asshole says soothingly but still with a bit of a chuckle. “He knows what you meant. A man teases only. Sometimes the nuance of language amuses him. She’s beautiful.” Arya’s glare, which had been subsiding, returns in full force until the Lorathi clarifies, “The dog, she’s beautiful. A Northern Shepherd?”

Arya narrows her eyes at him critically, wary of falling into another trap with her wording, but the man seems genuine, if a bit forward. He’s been handsome enough to get away with it so far, but if he keeps pushing she’ll introduce him to her fist. What she wouldn't give to have her gun on her, or even just her nightstick… not that she'd actually  _ use _ either of them, of course, but people tend to leave her alone once they see she's carrying. After all, sometimes a big fucking dog only intimidates so much. “Wolfswood Malinois,” she says finally, and leans down to run her hand over the soft dark fur between Nymeria’s ears. Her faithful pup leans into the contact and thumps her tail against the ground lightly a couple times. “She’s got direwolf in her a couple generations back.”

The man looks appropriately impressed, which earns a couple points back into his favor. Arya thinks about putting her earphones back in and going back to her podcast for a moment, and then figures she’ll probably never see this dude again, so might as well make some conversation with the hot stranger. “She’s Nymeria,” she says, “and I’m Arya. Arya Stark.” When she reaches out her hand, he takes it with another smile. He’s got a good face for smiling, a nice strong chin and dimples and shit. His hair falls into his eyes again, and once more he brushes it to the side.

“This man has the honor of being Jaqen H’ghar, of the Free City of Lorath,” he says.

Jaqen H’ghar, she discovers over the next half hour of chatting with him, is actually sort of cool when he’s not preoccupied with poking fun at her. They make casual small talk, the kind Arya normally hates, but he manages to be both interesting and engaging. Despite being even older than Gendry, and therefore _old_ _as balls_ , he has something of a boyish charm in the way he talks, in the tilt of his lips when he smiles. He positively _oozes_ charisma, the way Jaime does. But unlike with Detective Lannister, she doesn't want to immediately punch his nose in when he makes any comment that could be remotely construed as teasing. She only wants to punch his nose in when he doesn't _stop_ teasing.

They talk about the book he’s reading (historical fiction revolving around the political intrigue of the War of Five Kings from, like, a gazillion years ago. She asks him if he’s a nerd or something and he just shrugs good-naturedly), and the weather in the North (he admits that he is, in fact, very cold but is too vain to put on as many coats as he actually wants to, and she laughs at him and tells him he's supremely stupid), their destinations from Harrenhal (a bus home to King’s Landing for her, and one to Maidenpool for work for him), which leads to what they do for a living (“A man is a freelancer,” is his breezy answer, which considering the hipster hair and the hipster peacoat and the hipster historical fiction book probably means he’s an unemployed starving artist of some sort, not that she has any room to judge considering she struggles mentally with how to describe her own job to a hot stranger who she doesn't want to think she’s crazy, and finally ends up with “I do commission work,” which honestly makes her sound like even more of an unemployed starving artist than he had, and also she lives with Gendry, who is actually a literal starving artist, though Gendry at least has a job).

Talking with him is simple and easy, and after a while she doesn’t even notice the weird way he speaks and she has to take less time deducing who he’s referring to at any given moment. Jaqen smiles freely and often, and flirts like he breathes, to the point where it’s almost as if he’s unaware that he’s doing it, which for all she knows could be a holdover from Lorathi culture or something. Maybe they’re all tremendous flirts across the Narrow Sea, who knows? King's Landing is the furthest east she's ever been.

“So, why did you say the  _ Free _ City of Lorath?” she asks. Nymeria has gotten bored of laying patiently in place and has lifted her head to rest her chin on Arya's knee, staring at her. Arya is petting her head as she and Jaqen talk. “Aren’t they all free cities? Slave trade has been illegal for centuries now.”

He'd put his book aside a while ago; he has a weirdly endearing habit of gesturing with his hands when he speaks, the way Syrio would, very Essosi. He sighs at her, looking a bit troubled, and she wonders if maybe she's pried into something she shouldn't have when he finally gives a big, expressive shrug and answers, “Slave trade is illegal, yes. Now. Illegality does not mean that it does not happen. However, more to the point, those cities named ‘Free’ have less to do with their opinions on slavery and more to do with their origin in ancient Valyria. Did a lovely girl not have basic history lessons when she went to school?” This last question is asked with a smile, bright and charming and utterly mocking. Arya sticks her tongue out at him and he gives a delighted laugh. “Impudent child!” he chuckles.

“High school was a long time ago,” she huffs defensively. And honestly, she’d never much cared for tales of ancient Valyria anyway, beyond the dragons; they all seemed like a bunch of self-righteous pricks.

“How long ago?” Jaqen asks, amused. “Last year?” She aims a light, half-hearted punch at his arm that he ducks away from with a smile, apparently unoffended by the familiar gesture.

“I’m twenty-five,” she snaps, and he stops laughing to give her a disbelieving once over. “I am! I’m just small, I can’t help that.” Then, abruptly, she remembers a comment he’d made before he’d gone back to teasing her. “Wait, hold on, are you saying slave trade still happens in Essos? I thought that shit-- sorry, that  _ stuff _ \-- was done away with?”

That troubled look crosses his expression again before he shrugs with another sigh. “A girl will find that in the East, old traditions are not so easily abandoned, even if they are not necessarily  _ good _ traditions.”

“I'm from the North,” Arya tells him wryly. “You don't have to explain traditions to me. Trust me, I know.”

Jaqen chuckles, that unhappy expression leaving him once more, and leans back in his seat, crossing one leg over the other knee. He sets his elbows on the armrests of the chair and props his chin in a hand to look at her. The motion is fluid, languid, and exinsuates the long lines of his body. Somewhere during their conversation he’d shed his peacoat; even this far North, packing this many people into such a small space has made the terminal uncomfortably warm, at least for her. He’s smaller than Gendry, unsurprisingly, since Gendry is a bull of a man, but Jaqen is… more sinewy than muscled. He’s got a runner's build. Arya forces herself to look away from his legs and back up to his face, not that that helps. When she’s dragged her eyes back to his, he’s smirking at her again.

“A man had wondered,” he says mildly, apropos of nothing so far as she can tell, and she blinks at him.

“What?”

“If you were Northern.” His smirk shifts into a charming smile, which is still no less teasing when he explains, “A lovely girl is quite pale, except for when she blushes.”

“Free City,” she prompts, trying to get him back on track to cover up the way her pale face is now probably embarrassingly red with a flush. “Bad traditions.” From the way his lips twitch back into a smirk, she doubts it works.

He lifts his eyes to the ceiling and licks his lips in thought, and Arya  _ glares _ at him while he’s not looking, because surely the asshole is doing this on purpose. After a moment, he starts explaining, “If a lovely girl were to go to southern Essos--”

That’s as far as he gets, because the intercom rings out, “ _ Now boarding flight three-twelve to Harrenhal. _ ” A flight attendant starts calling for groups of boarders to line up, and Arya and Jaqen blink at each other in surprise before a smile crosses his face again, though this one looks mildly disappointed. He heaves a sigh and raises his hands into a helpless shrug. With Nymeria, Arya is part of the first boarding group, and she gives him a similarly sad smile in return.

“It was nice meeting you,” she tells him, surprising herself with the sincerity of it as she stands and grabs her carry-on bag. It actually is  _ was _ nice meeting him, even with all the teasing. Nymeria stands when she does, and though her ears are pricked up and her tail is wagging slightly she doesn’t strain against the harness. She may not be a true service dog, but she knows that she has to be on good behavior when she wears the vest. Barking and bouncing can happen once it’s off.

“A pleasure, sweet child,” Jaqen tells her, and smiles after her when she leaves to board.

Things are kind of a rush, from there. She’d had to purchase a second seat on the plane to have Nymeria sitting with her, since the dog is so big, but Arya isn’t exactly strapped for cash given her family so it wasn’t that big of a deal. She’s directed towards the back of the plane, which is unfortunate because that means she’ll have to sit near the toilets and she’ll have to deal with everyone walking by her constantly. The seats are in rows of twos, and she stows her carry-on into the bin above her head and then snaps her fingers above the seat at the window. “Up, Nymeria, up,” she commands, and Nymeria hops up into the seat. She looks around with excited curiosity, glancing from the window to the plane around them with her ears raised and her eyes wide while Arya drops into her own seat, the aisle-facing interior, closing her eyes as the other passengers file on and find their own seats.

“Well, well, well,” says a familiar voice after a few minutes of her listening to the shuffling of bodies navigating the plane, and when Arya opens her eyes again Jaqen is standing in the aisle in front of her, hands on his hips and a smile on his face. Once he has her attention, he waves a hand at the empty seat across the aisle from her. “A man had not thought to hope that his ticket would bring him back to a girl. Is this what someone would call serendipity?” Her lips split into a grin before she’s even realized it.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she says half-accusingly, the words gentled into a joke by the genuine delight in her voice. She takes a brief moment to examine that in her head, weirdly defensive against herself. He’s a good conversationalist, and he’s cute.  _ Don’t read into it so much _ , she tells herself.

“He finds himself pleasantly surprised,” Jaqen admits as he shoves his backpack into his own overhead bin, and gestures at the person behind him to take the window-most of the pair of seats they’re to share. He settles into his own seat and tucks his book, which he's been holding onto, into the pouch on the back of the seat in front of him. “He admits, he'd been enjoying the conversation. He'd found a lovely girl to be most entertaining.”

Arya shrugs at him. “Glad I can be of service. Hope you still find me entertaining for the next six hours.” She's still smiling, she realizes, and tries to stifle it. Instead she just ends up chewing on her lip.

Jaqen inclines his head to where he’s stowed his book. “A man has a replacement, if you’re not.” When she makes a noise of mock offense, he smiles at her. (Over his shoulder, Arya can see the man he’s sharing a row with roll his eyes violently.)

They both politely quiet when the flight attendant gives the requisite safety demonstration, and once the plane starts moving, turning to take it’s place on the runway to prepare to take off, Arya looks back at Jaqen and says, “So, what would happen if a lovely girl went to southern Essos?”

He seems to think for a moment before making a small sound of recognition, apparently trying to recall what they’d been talking about before boarding. He leans across the aisle to speak to her, thankfully a relatively short distance; still, it’s hard to find a good balance of volume between loud enough to be heard over the noise of the engine, and soft enough so as not to disturb the other passengers. The result is a rumbly half-murmur that sends a little thrill up her spine before Arya stubbornly stomps it back down. She’s not  _ Sansa _ , for the gods’ sakes.

“A man does not wish to poison a good conversation with talks of slavery,” Jaqen says after a moment of contemplation. (Behind him, the man sharing his row of seats gives them both a very, very concerned look.) “Let us speak instead of northern Essos. Like in Westeros, the North there breeds good people. A man's homeland of Lorath is in the North, as is the friendly, if flamboyant, Braavos.”

“I had a teacher from Braavos,” Arya says with a wistful smile, looking away from him briefly. “He was a good man. I wanted to learn fencing, but instead he taught me to  _ dance _ .”

Jaqen looks surprised, and then impressed. “A girl was taught the Braavosi water dance? A noble art.”

That warm feeling in her heart that bloomed when she thought of her old beloved teacher Syrio sours. “A noble art that doesn’t do much good against a gun.” Jaqen tilts his head in question, and she takes a deep breath and shrugs as she lets it out. “Shit happens,” is the only answer she gives.

Jaqen seems to give that due contemplation, then nods slowly. “Indeed. Shit happens.” He opens his mouth to continue, but the pilot over the loudspeaker interrupts, greeting the passengers and detailing the flight. Six hours to Harrenhal, clear skies, estimated time of arrival as seven in the evening. The plane is moving again by the time he’s finished talking. Beside Arya, Nymeria is shifting in her seat, paws tip-tapping against the faux-leather nervously. Arya turns away from Jaqen after giving him an apologetic look and starts to comfort her dog. Nymeria does well enough once they’re in the air, it’s the take off that the pup doesn’t like.

Arya is, honestly, much the same.

When the plane begins to accelerate rapidly, the engines roaring as it gains speed, Arya grits her teeth and shuts her eyes. She’s been on planes a dozen times, more than that maybe, but she will  _ never _ enjoy taking off and landing. She takes a deep breath, fingers digging into her armrests like claws, and then jolts in place, eyes flying open, when a hand pats at her arm. Jaqen has reached across the aisle, and when she meets his gaze he offers her a sympathetic smile. “Nervous flyer?”

“Fine once we’re in the air,” she answers shortly, and against her better judgement takes his hand in her own. “You’re a very friendly stranger,” she mutters after a good minute of silence except for the rattle of the plane as it defies gravity and lifts into the air. His hand squeezes hers and she hears him give a good-natured chuckle.

“A man tries,” he says primly, and she bites her lip with a small smile.

* * *

Six hours pass both slowly and quickly. She and Jaqen talk on and off, about small inconsequential things mostly. He’s a good conversationalist, the kind that feels easy to talk to and who isn’t afraid to stop talking when the conversation ends. Silence falls between them organically and comfortably; at some point he goes back to his book and reads for an hour while she and Nymeria stare out their window, but when she asks him abruptly about the plot of the book he closes it and indulges her once more. At about the halfway mark of the flight he stands and pulls his backpack out of the overhead compartment, apologizing quietly to the man sharing his row, and from it takes out a laptop and spends a half hour staring intently at the screen before typing rapidly for another half hour. Arya wonders briefly what he’s doing, since the plane doesn’t have wifi so he can’t be checking email or something, but even  _ she _ knows that asking would be nosy and rude. Once he finishes that task, whatever it is, he tucks the laptop away again, though he leaves the backpack and shoves it instead under his seat.

He naps, briefly-- or at the very least he shuts his eyes and doesn’t react when people pass by to use the restroom, or when his neighbor shuffles in his seat. Arya uses that time to look at him, really look at him. He’s handsome, but she already knew that. Strong chin, strong cheekbones, full lips, an attractively squared jaw, if a bit thinner than Gendry’s. Gendry is, as ever, the standard to which she measures people she finds attractive. Arya has never been sure if this is because he was the first person she’d ever slept with, or if it’s because he’s the person she’s slept with the most, or if it’s because he’s the only person she’s slept with that actually mattered in the long run. For all that she and Gendry fight, for all that she does genuinely think he’s an idiot most of the time and that the two of them are  _ garbage _ for each other, he is still a part of her. A big part. He has to be. How could he not? Why else would they keep wandering their way back to each other?

Jaqen, though, seems cheerful where Gendry is bitter, smiles where Gendry glowers, and Arya can’t even take full responsibility for Gendry’s sour personality because he was like that from the first day they’d met. Sure, he has his moments of levity, but they’re far outweighed by how often he’s sullen. Arya used to delight in making him smile. It felt like she could draw the sun out from behind the clouds. She used to love his smile.

She shakes her head sharply, sudden enough that it catches Nymeria’s attention and she leans over and licks Arya’s ear and cheek until she pushes the dog away with a laugh. No, she’s not thinking about Gendry right now. Right now she’s looking at the sleeping Lorathi eye candy.

The eye candy sleeps right through a bout of turbulence that rattles the plan, and only wakes with a grunt when Nymeria, who’s begun to pant nervously, lets out a sudden bark. Arya shushes her, grimacing when five or six people in their vicinity all turn and glare at her. She glares right back at them, and finally stops when she hears Jaqen give a sleepy chuckle. Nymeria shuffles anxiously in her seat, spinning in a tight circle before Arya manages to calm her again with a bribe of the complementary bag of pretzel sticks. Jaqen laughs again when the pup inhales them down with a short series of chomps.

“I don’t see how you slept through that,” Arya huffs at him once she’s got Nymeria settled again. She’s raised the arm rest between the two seats so that her dog can lay down, head resting in Arya’s lap. She still pants lightly, but not as hard, and Arya snakes a hand under her vest to scratch between her shoulders.

“A man is used to air travel.” His voice is gravelly, rough with sleep, and Arya has a brief, sudden thought to wonder what it might sound like murmuring against her skin. She swallows and runs at her arms, sensitive with sudden goosebumps.

“Family?” she asks, thinking about her parents and her brothers. She tries to visit Winterfell at least once a year, but her stays there are often short. Nobody in her family but Bran and Rickon likes what she does for a living; Bran is ambivalent, and Rickon thinks it's the coolest. Her father and Robb, working as they do, recognize her job as a necessary evil, but don't like it, and especially don't like that  _ she's  _ doing it. Mother hates it. Jon doesn't whine about how dangerous it is, but he  _ looks _ at her when she talks about it and his look is a whine. Sansa is in King's Landing with her, though on the other side of the city, and she doesn't have much of an opinion on Arya's life choices these days. Things between them aren't as… tumultuous as they used to be when they were younger, and the two have managed to build something of a respect and a rapport between them with age, but Arya isn't sure she could claim to be  _ close _ to her sister. They're too fundamentally different for that.

“Work,” he corrects with a grimace. “It takes a man all over the place.”

“Freelancing?” she asks, using his description from earlier pointedly. “What kind of freelancing do you do that makes you travel?”

There's a flash, a sharp look that’s there and gone behind his blue eyes, that makes her fingers in Nymeria's fur tighten and the dog gives a soft little huff of reproach. It isn't cold so much as lacking the warmth that she's come to expect from him over the last few hours. It’s searching.  _ Calculating _ . And it's gone from one breath to the next and he's smiling again, though this time with a sardonic twist to his lips.

“Commission work,” he says simply, using her own words from before as well. His expression is mild, but Arya makes a living off of quick judgement calls and trusting her gut, the necessary rapid assessment of threats, and she knows suddenly that for all his smiles and laughs there is more to Jaqen H'ghar than how he seems at first glance.

Arya makes a living off of assessing threats. She also makes a living off of running directly towards them. There's a reason her family hates her job, after all.

“Alright, message received, no asking questions about work,” she says placatingly, not bothering to hide the interest in her voice despite her words. She squints at him for a moment, giving him a slow once-over, then says, “I bet you’re a writer, or something.” He sends her a dry look. “What? I’m not asking questions, I’m  _ extrapolating _ .”

“What, pray tell, are you extrapolating from?”

Arya gestures at the entirety of him. “Just, you know. You. You look like someone who majored in literature in college and doesn’t make enough money to pay off the student loans.” His expression morphs into one of offended befuddlement.

“ _ What. _ ”

Arya sighs, then takes a deep breath. “Your peacoat and your backpack are both high quality, but old-- the elbows of the coat are worn thin and the right pocket either has a hole in the seam, or had one until recently, and it’s tailored to your waist and shoulders so you've put money into keeping it up, but it’s at least half a decade old. Also, the fabric at the base of the backpack has been replaced at least once, but I’d guess twice. You got the book you’re reading used, but it’s not a library copy. Ergo, you’re thrifty, and have learned to take care of what you have so you don’t have to replace it.” He stares at her with something like astonishment, and she shrugs. “I didn’t go to college myself, but I have friends who did, and I know what it looks like when someone has to live paycheck to paycheck to pay off loans.” She knows that  _ intimately _ . Gendry  _ still _ bitches about it and he's been out of school and mooching off of her for almost four years.

Jaqen leans back in his seat and crosses his arms. That calculating look is back on his face, but it lingers this time, eyes narrowed, like he’s assessing her now the same way she’d assessed him earlier. “How did a girl reach these conclusions?” he asks finally, his voice still deep and grumbly but not from sleep this time.

She shrugs. “The elbows are easy, and the right pocket has a piece of thread hanging out of it. I thought earlier it might have been loose, but it hasn’t come out even with you taking it off and putting it back on and sticking your hands in the pockets so many times, so it’s attached to the seam on the inside. I know roundabouts how old it is because it’s got a lower waistline and a higher collar than the peacoats that are currently in style.” Here, Arya grimaces briefly, “Admittedly, that I only know because my sister went to school for fashion and we lived together until a few years ago. I know a lot more about waistlines and collar cuts and pleats and that sort of bullshit than I ever, ever wanted to. For the backpack, the threading in the seam of the base is a different color than the threading on the rest, but it’s close enough to the rest that I’m guessing it was an attempt to match colors and not a voluntary choice on the manufacturers’ part to have an accent color. Except for the seam that makes up the back side, which is a lighter color than the other replacement thread, so I’m guessing that’s from the second repair. Again, that is courtesy of fashion sister. I didn’t even know accent colors were, like, a thing until she had me proofread a presentation on it.”

Jaqen snorts, looking more amused than before as she explains. “And the book, lovely girl?”

“It’s old, and the spine is broken further along then you’ve read.” He opens his mouth to interrupt, and she holds up a finger and continues, “ _ But _ , that could be from you rereading it. Except that it’s got dogeared pages, which I can tell because of how they fall against each other, but every time you’ve closed it you’ve used a bookmark, so you’re not the first person to read it, and it doesn’t have a stamp on the inside of the cover, so it’s probably not from a library.” Then she pauses and couches the explanation with, “But I could be wrong.” She shrugs again, then smiles and gives a little half-bow when he claps his hands together, lightly so as not to be disturbing to the other passengers.

“A girl is very observant,” he tells her, sounding  _ admiring _ , and she fights down a blush and chews lightly on her lip, inordinately pleased at the praise. “But how did she conclude this man was a student of literature?”

“Because he’s a fucking nerd,” she answers, voice grim, and he lets out a startled snort of laughter. Again, Nymeria looks up curiously, but now she looks at Jaqen instead of Arya, and her ears flop over as she tilts her head at him. (The man on Jaqen’s other side gives the two of them a look of extreme irritation.) “You’d be a nerd already just from reading historical fiction. But you’re from Essos, and you’re reading Westerosi historical fiction, so you’re a  _ fucking _ nerd. And I think you’re a writer because you travel a lot for work, maybe to do research, and because earlier you were writing on your laptop.”

“Do you pay so much attention to every stranger you speak to?” he wonders, moving an elbow to lean on his armrest and his chin dropping to settle into his palm.

Arya bites her lip again and decides,  _ fuck it _ . “Just the cute ones,” she says seriously.

A slow, heady smirk spreads across his face, and there’s something like heat in his eyes. He gives a quiet contemplative hum, and after a moment murmurs, “A man will keep this in mind.” The look lingers for a time before he glances away, and she follows suit by turning her gaze to Nymeria, whose head is still in her lap and who now dozes, half-lidded, though she tenses each time the plane shudders against the wind. By now the sky outside the windows of the plane is dark, and the running lights along the aisles are glowing dimly. Arya has her own overhead light turned on, though Jaqen has left his off, probably as a courtesy to his abused neighbor, who seems as though he’s trying (and failing) to doze as well, based on the aggravated look on his face. It throws Jaqen’s own face into shadow, which just exinsuates the blue of his eyes and the bright shock of white hair at his temple.

“Where did she learn this habit of observation, he wonders?” he asks suddenly, and when Arya looks back up at him he’s returned to looking at her as well. She grimaces, trying to think of an answer to give him that isn’t  _ I’m a glorified stalker for money. _

She settles on the truth, though not the whole truth in its entirety. “My father used to be the Police Commissioner in Winterfell, and my older brother is a detective constable. My cousin, the one I was visiting at Castle Black, was going to be one too, but he decided to go back to school. I guess I just come by it honestly.”

“So a girl follows more after them than she does her ‘fashion sister’.”

Arya snorts. “You have no idea.”

Jaqen makes a thoughtful noise before saying, “A man thought you said you were visiting your  _ brother _ at Castle Black.” Arya grimaces again, and he continues quickly, “But he does not mean to pry…”

She rolls her eyes at him. “I think at this point we’re a little beyond prying, Jaqen, considering I just analyzed you to the hells and back.” Though, to be fair, he never did confirm or deny her suspicions of his being a broke writer. “Jon is my cousin, his mother was my father’s sister, but she died in childbirth and his own father wasn’t in the picture, so my family took him in and my parents raised him. I grew up calling him ‘brother’, and I still think of him like that, but as he got older I think he wanted to… I don’t know. Differentiate himself from us, I guess. He calls all of us his cousins instead of his siblings now. I’ve tried to follow his lead, but to me he’s still just my older brother, and I slip up.” She shrugs, then hesitates before continuing, “My family can be a bit insular. The ‘rents weren’t happy when my sister and I decided to stay in King’s Landing.”

“A man cannot bring himself to be sympathetic,” Jaqen tells her seriously, and when she raises an eyebrow at him he explains, voice lowers back to that rumbly murmur, “If she did not live in King’s Landing, she may not have boarded a plane and met a man, and that man would have been bereft of lovely conversation with a sweet girl.”

Arya feels heat crawling up her neck and into her cheeks and she bites her lip again, trying to think of something cool and seductive to say even though she’s shit at cool and seductive, but the opportunity is torn from her by the man sharing Jaqen’s row, who leans forward around Jaqen to look at the both of them in disgust. “Please,” he says irritably, “just go into the bathroom and fuck or something. I’ve listened to the two of you flirt for the entirety of the plane ride. This is ridiculous.”

Arya’s eyes widen in shock and she ducks her head, mortified. Jaqen is still smiling, but it isn’t as friendly now, and when he swivels in his seat to look at the man beside him, whatever is in his expression that his neighbor can see but Arya can’t causes him to flinch and whip around to stare out the plane window again. She firmly avoids looking at him, preoccupying herself with running her fingers through Nymeria’s fur, and after a minute or so of her ignoring him she hears Jaqen heave a quiet sigh and the shuffle of pages as he draws his book back out. Eventually, she gets out her phone and preoccupies herself with it to keep from embarrassing herself further, but the puzzle game she's playing is far less engaging than the handsome Lorathi across from her had been, and who now positively  _ radiates _ disappointment.

The last hour of the trip is quiet, which is probably just as well because they hit more turbulence the closer they get to Harrenhal, and by the time they finally touch down Nymeria is a trembling mess, muscles jumping anxiously under her fur as the lights come on and the intercom buzzes once more so the pilots can give their farewell speech. Arya is somewhat gratified to see that Jaqen isn’t one of those losers who claps when the plane lands. She waits while everyone else disembarks; Nymeria makes her one of the first to board and the last to get off, and as Jaqen passes her he brushes a hand gently over her shoulder. It feels like every touch receptor in her body migrates briefly to that spot for how much it tingles. Gods, she feels supremely  _ stupid _ .

As soon as they’re off the plane, before they even reach the terminal proper, Nymeria squats and pees a lake while Arya makes helpless apologies to the airline employees, who are thankfully good-natured about it. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, Jaqen is waiting for her in the terminal, and the two of them walk together in silence to the baggage carousel on the floor below. Nymeria bounces in place anxiously; she’s well-behaved, but she’s also been on a plane for over six hours at this point, and Malinois are not a breed made for stillness. Arya picks up her suitcase (hard plastic, black and grey paisley patterning with pawprints, a Midwinter’s gift from Gendry last year after she’d made noise for months about needing a new one), and then waits until Jaqen gets his (duffle bag, black canvas, austere and almost military; it looks smart when paired with his wool peacoat and scarf, and is absolutely the newest thing that he visibly owns besides his laptop). When he realizes  _ she’s _ waiting for  _ him _ now, he gives her a small smile.

After they get their baggage they make their way together towards the back exit of the airport, where it connects to the long-term parking and the large overhang where busses routinely come to pick up passengers bound for nearby hotels. Arya pulls her phone out to order an Uber when Jaqen touches her shoulder lightly, just as he had on the plane. When she looks up at him curiously, he looks…  _ nervous _ . It’s a strange expression on him, not one he wears particularly well; for the whole day that she’s spent talking to him, he’s been collected, casual, confident. It’s disgustingly endearing. Once he’s got her attention, he slips his hands back into the pockets of his peacoat and clears his throat.

“A man  _ has _ genuinely enjoyed the conversations he’s shared with you,” he says. “He would be… most aggrieved if he did not attempt to continue them.”

“Jaqen,” she says, amused despite herself and biting her lip, “can I see your book?”

He blinks at her in confusion, then drops his backpack off his shoulder and unzips the small front pocket and pulls his book out. While he’s doing that, she fishes through her purse for a pen, and once he’s handed her the book she cracks open the back cover and scrawls her phone number onto one of the last pages and then gives it back to him. By the time she’s finished he’s grinning, and that smooth confidence is back on his face and in the set of his shoulders.

“There,” she says simply, then shoves her hands into her own pockets, fingers tightening around Nymeria’s leash. His confidence might have come back, but this is so out of her realm of experience that she’s bluffing out her ass-- hot foreign strangers come onto  _ Sansa _ , not  _ Arya _ . “Now if you want to continue our conversations, you can.” Then, teasingly, “Once you finish your book.”

“A man will do this,” he promises. As he does, a shuttle pulls up, the logo of a hotel splashed along the side, and when it parks ahead of them Jaqen looks contrite. “It appears his ride has gotten here.” He hesitates, then leans forward. Arya thinks for a split second that he’s going to kiss her and her eyes widen, but she stands still, frozen in place. Instead, Jaqen presses his lips to her temple, the one opposite of his own with the streak of white hair, before pulling away. He’s still smiling, blue eyes bright, as he turns and climbs into the shuttle.

At her feet, Nymeria fidgets, and Arya takes a deep breath before admonishing herself. She shouldn’t get so flustered over _men_. She’s _not_ _Sansa_. She finishes ordering her Uber before Jaqen’s bus is even out of sight, and spends the time waiting for it to walk Nymeria around the complex. The dog’s nose is to the ground, sniffling eagerly, and she tugs against her harness in a way she very rarely ever does except when she’s incredibly excited. As they walk, Arya checks her messages and emails-- two texts from Gendry, the first reminding her to text him once her plane has landed and the second a meme from the television show they’ve been binging recently; one from her father and one from Jon, both asking for her to let them know when she’s back home; one from Shireen, a selfie of her and Devan and their cat Onion with a photo filter on that swaps all of their faces; one from Sandor, letting her know they’ve got a skip job and telling her to get her ass home ASAP; and, distressingly, an email from the transportation company she’d purchased her bus ticket to King’s Landing from, telling her that the bus she’d originally been set to be on was under emergency maintenance and that another was scheduled to depart the next afternoon, and she could transfer her ticket to that one free of charge.

She frowns down at her phone, confirms the bus change, and texts back the various and sundry people who’d sent her messages (to Gendry,  _ landed, bus delay tho _ and also  _ lol _ . To her father and Jon, identical texts of  _ bus delay, have to find a hotel to stay the night, will be back home tomorrow. Love you! _ To Shireen,  _ please tell devan to shave that fucking beard, it’s the saddest thing i’ve ever seen, made only slightly better by the fact that it’s on onion’s face and not his _ . To Sandor,  _ eat my entire ass i’m an adult _ .), and by the time she’s got all of that settled her Uber has pulled up. Her original plan had been to go to the bus station, but now that that’s been axed she instead asks the driver, “Where’s the nearest dog park?”

A little less than half an hour later, Nymeria is tearing across the grass, barking joyously and luxuriating in all of the space she has to run. She’s the only dog there this late at night, and Arya is thankful that there are street lamps dotting the sidewalk so she can keep track of her pup as she reclines across a park bench. In the email from the travel company that operated the bus line is a list of recommended hotels in Harrenhal where she can get a discounted room for the night, complementary for the inconvenience of the rescheduling. Coincidently, the hotel that owned the shuttle Jaqen had boarded is one of them. Coincidently again, that hotel is pet friendly.

She leans further back onto the bench, biting her lip and contemplating how weird it’d be if she picked the same hotel the hot stranger she’d flirted with all day was staying in, when she receives a text from a number she doesn’t recognize.

**FROM [Unknown Sender]** :  _ A man found he did not want to wait until he’d finished a book. _

Arya takes a deep breath before calling the hotel. There is thankfully a room available, wonder of wonders. The universe itself, it seems, is contriving to set her up with a hot Lorathi. What was it he’d said to her on the plane? Something about serendipity?

She lets Nymeria run around and get some of her pent up energy out for a while, not responding to Jaqen’s text and debating on if this is something she actually wants to go through with. He’d  _ seemed _ interested, certainly, but maybe not like.  _ That kind _ of interested. Maybe he just liked talking to her and that was it. Arya has never been the best at believing that good things could happen to her.  _ Sansa _ , sure. Good things happen to Sansa all the time. (She feels unfair about that thought as soon as she has it; shitty things happen to Sansa too, Arya knows.) But good things like this, funny and interesting and cute guys wanting to get to know her, that’s really not something she’s got a lot of experience with. Mostly, she just has experience with Gendry, and things just sort of… happened with him.

She’s had one night stands before, though truthfully very few, and she doesn’t have much of a problem sleeping with people she’s not dating. That doesn’t really matter to her. It’s more that she’d already  _ known _ those people, were mostly already friends with them, and she  _ knew _ they wanted to have sex with her, too. Approaching a stranger about it is nerve wracking.

Finally, she decides, fuck it. She’ll probably never see him again after this. Might as well go for it, and if she’s read the situation wrong then she’ll be mildly embarrassed for a day or two and then move on. She can even laugh about it over drinks with Sandor when they’ve finished their next job. Fuck it. She’s an adult. If  _ Sansa _ can do it, then by gods Arya can do it too.

She calls up another Uber, pays extra for them to stop briefly at a twenty-four hour Harris Teeter and grabs a bottle of wine, something midtier and sweet that’s not cheap but not too pricey, and after a moment of humiliating deliberation on if she  _ really wants to do this _ , a box of condoms. Just in case. The cashier that rings her up raises his eyebrow and says nothing, but the girl in line behind her who looks to be about Arya’s own age with a Qartheen-style piercing in her septum gives her a thumbs up and says brightly, “Hell yeah queen, get some!” Mortified and oddly cheered all at once, Arya spends the rest of the ride to the hotel both she and Jaqen are staying in fidgeting nervously.

She checks in, pays for the room, and rides the elevator in silence save for Nymeria’s panting presence at her side. When she gets in her room she tosses her luggage to the side, takes off Nymeria’s vest and harness, and then decides she’s stalled long enough and pulls her phone back out.

**TO [Unknown Sender]** :  _ If i were to tell you that my bus got switched to tomorrow and i was staying at the same hotel you were in, what do you think your reaction would be? _

She checks out the bathroom while waiting for a reply and studies it with more consideration then it’s really due. There’s a tub, small for anyone else but big enough that she could take a bath in it if she wanted to, a sink with a wide counter, a hair dryer plugged into the wall. She uncaps and smells the complementary shampoo and conditioner (tea tree, clean and fresh smelling, she’ll definitely be taking that with her when she leaves tomorrow) and wastes time checking the water pressure (adequate at best, but hot enough to turn her skin red in seconds which is more important). When her phone buzzes on the counter she pounces on it, nerves fried.

**FROM [Unknown Sender]** :  _ Pleased surprise, and curiosity as to how you knew which hotel a man would be staying in. _

**TO [Unknown Sender]** :  _ I extrapolated from your clothes again _

**TO [Unknown Sender]** :  _ And also the bus you got on at the airport that had the hotel logo on it in like four different places _

When he doesn’t reply immediately, Arya takes a couple deep breaths and plugs the drain of the tub, turning the water on to fill it. She briefly contemplates cracking open the bottle of wine and just fucking guzzling it on her own to get some of her courage back, but berates herself immediately after having the thought. He’s just a guy. A hot guy, yeah, but still just a guy. Gendry’s just a guy and she’s plowed him loads of times. She strips off her clothes, glad to be out of them after wearing them on and off a plane, and slips into the tub once it’s half full, setting her phone on the edge of it. Almost as soon as she does it buzzes again and she snatches it up.

**FROM [Unknown Sender]** :  _ Curiosity assuaged. Only pleased surprise remains. :) _

Arya forces herself to take another long, slow breath.

**TO [Unknown Sender]** :  _ And if i were to ask what room you were in? What do you think your reaction would be then? _

She gives herself a perfunctory scrub, washing the airport germs away. Nymeria pokes her head through the door curiously and lays down on the bathroom floor, head on her paws, and watches as Arya shaves her legs. “What?” Arya asks her defensively. “Sometimes a bitch just likes shaved legs. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Leave me alone. Go away.” Nymeria, as usual, doesn’t reply.

When she finishes, she checks her phone.

**FROM [Unknown Sender]** :  _ Anticipation. _

Arya bites her lip. A warm, roiling feeling wells up inside her, just south of her gut, that has nothing to do with the bath water. She slides her legs together and the feeling grows.

**TO [Unknown Sender]** :  _ What room are you in? _

* * *

Arya’s libido has always been mercurial at best. Most of the time, she can do without sex; it’s never been a driving need for her, never something she’s really had to think about. She’s only dated a handful of people, and slept with about the same number, though the list of people she’s dated and the list of people she’s fucked don’t necessarily completely overlap. On the whole she finds the practice largely underwhelming and unsanitary. She can go months and months without wanting it, then spend a fortnight  _ needing _ it, then go back to not caring at all.

It’d been a point of contention with Gendry, when they’d first started dating. He never  _ forced _ her, gods no, but when he was in the mood and she wasn't, she generally just tolerated the attention because it made him happy and it didn’t really matter enough to her to argue about. It mattered to him though, apparently. Her on-again, off-again sex drive either made him feel like the most desired man in the world, or like she couldn’t bare to touch him, both of which were (to her, at least) obvious exaggerations. Arya will be the first to admit that she can be prickly, tactile one night and then aloof the next, but she’s always believed herself to be affectionate with actions if not with words. But Gendry  _ needs _ , in a way that she doesn’t,  _ needs _ affirmation and proof that he’s wanted, and at the start of their relationship that had been difficult for the both of them to reconcile. They got over it, eventually. Or maybe they’d only thought they had, and that’s why they’re not together now.

Speaking of Gendry, her first time had been with him-- she’d been fifteen, and he was twenty-one.

It hadn’t really mattered to her that much at the time. The age difference, that is. She didn't really care about that. He wasn't like Gendry the letcher or Gendry the pedophile or anything. Not to her. He was just Gendry, and she wanted to have sex with him, so she did.

It was Sansa's fault, really; she'd been gushing to Jeyne Poole over the phone about getting to third base with Joffrey and ignoring the disgusted looks Arya had been sending her across the room. They were still sharing a dorm at Maegor's and Arya had been trying to study for her midterm chemistry exam, but stupid Sansa was on the phone and  _ wouldn't stop talking _ about Joffrey's tongue or his knob or whatever it was she was blathering about.

“Can you shut up or something?” Arya had asked finally, and Sansa had just rolled her eyes and laughed at something Jeyne had said. So Arya had tried again. “Can you  _ please _ shut up or something?” She'd thought the please had been a nice touch.

“Can you stop being  _ awful? _ ” Sansa had snapped, which Arya had thought was a bit rich considering she'd said please and Sansa hadn't.

Arya had scoffed and grumbled, “So some blonde shit stuck his hand up your shirt, who cares? That's stupid anyway. It's just a tit.” (Arya had tried masturbating once or twice but didn't really see the appeal in it. It had mostly just felt awkward and kind of embarrassing and she'd stopped before she could start feeling like an idiot, and since she barely had breasts to speak of she hadn't bothered with them much. Sansa and Jeyne loved to tell her she could use bandaids for bras because her boobs were so small. She'd waited years for them to fill out the way Sansa's had, but they never did. Most days she’d just go without a bra. Whatever. It'd saved money.)

And Sansa had said, “Gods, like you even know what you're talking about, you're such a  _ baby _ ,” and Arya had very maturely thrown her chemistry textbook at her, and then Sansa had shrieked and stormed out so at least Arya hadn't had to hear about Joff and his stupid tongue anymore.

But she hadn't been able to stop thinking about it, because Sansa wasn't wrong, Arya  _ didn't  _ really know what she was talking about. She'd never even kissed a boy before, much less had one touch her boobs. So she thought about it while she studied, and she thought about it while taking her exams, and she thought about it after school let out for midwinter break and she spent most of her days hanging out with Gendry because she’d been avoiding Winterfell and her family and  _ Bran _ as much as she could, and because he had nothing better to do than hang out with her.

They were playing Left for Dead on his Xbox and shooting wights and she wasn't pulling her weight because she was busy being distracted by his biceps and his hands and the way his tongue poked out and his eyebrows furrowed when he concentrated. He'd let her have a couple of his beers because she'd bitched until he'd caved, so she was feeling pleasantly buzzed and sort of floaty, and when he’d paused the game to ask her grumpily, “Are you even  _ paying attention _ , Arya?” she'd set her controller down and crawled into his lap and kissed him, because he was there and she wanted to.

He'd put up a fair protest, but Arya had decided sometime between listening to Sansa on the phone and getting in his lap that she wanted to fuck him, and she knew that he wanted to fuck her too even he didn't want to admit it-- at least, she thought he did, she knew he watched her when he didn't think she was paying attention. And after she'd stuck her hand down his pants he'd stopped asking what she was doing, and when she'd taken her shirt off and brought one of his big warm palms to her chest he'd started moaning her name, and it felt nice to be proven right. He'd wanted it all along after all, just like she'd thought. Knowing that, being right, it had made her feel good. It had made her feel better than his cock in her hand did, or his hands on her tits. She’d been right. She'd been  _ wanted _ .

Anyway, they'd fucked right there on his couch, hard and fast and dirty, and they kept fucking until his Xbox timed out and turned itself off, and afterwards Arya fell into a light doze on his lap, her head tucked under his chin and her hips aching kind of painfully, kind of pleasantly. And when she woke up, Gendry wouldn't look at her.

“We shouldn't have--  _ gods _ , Arya, you're not even  _ sixteen _ , how could I have--”

“But I wanted to,” she'd argued petulantly, because she had and that was all that should have mattered to anyone, that he'd wanted it and so had she.

“But you  _ shouldn't have _ , Arya!  _ Fuck! _ Fuck, Arya.”

She'd frowned up at him, and then tried to kiss him again, because he'd seemed to enjoy that and because she was quickly losing that blissful feeling she'd been riding on from a couple beers and her first ever orgasm, and she didn't understand what the  _ problem _ was. He’d turned his face from hers and gently pushed her out of his lap.

“You should-- you should go,” he'd told her, not meeting her eyes. “That shouldn't have happened. You need to go.”

So Arya had put her clothes back on, trying not to wince as she moved even though her whole lower half felt weirdly stretched and  _ wrong _ . She didn't want to show any weakness, any sign that this had been a bad idea, but it wouldn't have mattered if she had; Gendry didn't look at her at all. As she'd shrugged back into her jacket, feeling stretched thin and hollow and not really understanding why, because she'd just felt  _ good _ , so  _ good _ , his hand had reached out and grabbed her wrist.

“Arya,” he'd said weakly. When she’d looked back at him, thinking that maybe he'd changed his mind, maybe he'd seen sense and realized how  _ stupid _ he was being, his blue, blue eyes were wide and  _ afraid _ . “Arya, you can't-- please don't tell anyone about this. I could-- please.”

And it fucking hurt, the whole godsdamned thing hurt so much, and she hadn’t asked for that hurt, because she’d been right and he'd wanted her and it had been  _ wonderful _ , so she'd just sneered at him and said, “What is there to tell?” and then left.

She'd been right. Sansa  _ was _ stupid for putting so much stock in idiot boys and idiot sex. Arya hadn't even really liked it, it had felt incredibly underwhelming. What was the  _ point? _ Why did everyone make such a big deal out of it? Being proved right about Sansa being stupid and sex being stupid and boys being stupid only sort of made her feel less angry about the whole thing, though.

From his apartment Arya had gone to a nearby pharmacy, flashed one of her fake IDs, and dropped forty bucks on a bottle of water and some Plan B since she wasn't on birth control, having not really planned on having sex. She’d torn the Plan B box open with her teeth on the sidewalk outside and downed it, then washed it down with the water. It hadn't tasted like anything, she'd thought, it wasn't even bitter. Wasn't shit like that supposed to be bitter? It was just a pill. She threw the box and the half-empty bottle of water away at the trashcan right there in front of the pharmacy, and then she went to the gym back at Maegor's and let out her frustrations on a punching bag until she felt better.

She’d punched for a long, long time, and she and Gendry didn't talk for a while after that.

* * *

Jaqen opens the door to his room a scant few seconds after Arya has knocked on it, bottle of wine in hand and a nervous smile on her face. He invites her in with a smile of his own, his friendly and disarming, and pops the cork on the wine with a pocket knife. She asks how he got it past airport security and he just winks. Lacking glasses, they drink out of insulated paper coffee cups and laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Arya explains the mishap with the bus and tells a small fib that this was the only hotel with the offered discount that also allowed pets, because she doesn’t want to look  _ too _ stalkery. He asks about her shirt; she’d changed clothes from the ones she’d worn all day and into a large KLU shirt she’d stolen from Gendry and a pair of soft cotton shorts that fell to her mid-thigh; the only clean clothes approaching pajamas she has left that are clean and not covered in Ghost's fur. She tells him the shirt is her roommate’s, because Gendry is just a bit too much to explain right now. Jaqen seems to take it at face value, nodding along and watching her with his bright blue eyes over the rim of his coffee cup as he sips at his wine. Within ten minutes of her entering the room he has her shoved up against the wall, his mouth on her neck and her hands clutching at his hair, coffee cups of wine forgotten on the table.

He’s  _ slower _ than she’d been expecting, more  _ focused _ ; his lips move with careful deliberation across the inside of her throat, and application of teeth is both judicious and generous, though he makes a point of scraping with them instead of biting. When she and Gendry kiss, Gendry is usually demanding, forceful, especially when he's angry which is often when they kiss these days, and that’s not a bad thing because she  _ likes _ that, but sometimes kissing Gendry feels like she’s fighting him. Jaqen feels like he’s  _ exploring _ her.

She has her legs wrapped around his stomach, the height difference between them significant enough that he can lift her easily, and the back of her head and her shoulders press into the wall as she bares her throat to him, chest pushed forwards, biting her lip. Her skin feels  _ alive _ under his mouth, under his hands, one at the small of her back for balance and the other at her waist, fingers dipping searchingly beneath the hem of her shirt, and her nails scratch at his scalp almost without her permission. The rasp of his stubble against her throat is nearly unbearable already, and she uses her grip on his hair to pull his face back up to hers.

He tastes like the wine, sweet and fruity, and beneath that taste something minty like maybe he’d brushed his teeth before she came over. The thought makes her smile, the grossly sweet idea of him doing something so mundane, and he pulls back slightly at the motion of her lips against his and she  _ feels _ the vibration in his throat when he gives a questioning hum.

“Nothing,” she whispers, and opens her eyes. Jaqen is watching her, his own eyes half-lidded and dark, and they look at her lips when she continues, “Don’t worry about it.” He hums again, considering, before dropping back down to her throat. There’s a spot at the edge of her jaw where it meets her neck that he seems enamoured with, pressing those slow and lingering kisses there, wet with tongue and sharp with just the barest hint of teeth. Apparently it’s a good fucking spot, because there seems to be a wire that runs through her body from it to her cunt that comes alive whenever he presses on it. Her thighs clench around his hips and his one hand that had been inching up her back beneath her shirt flexes, his blunt nails digging in to the right of her spine.

He bites lightly, more of a graze than a nip, and she lets loose a moan of surprise without meaning to, aborted halfway through when she draws her lower lip between her own teeth and chews on it, embarrassed. “No,” Jaqen murmurs into her throat, mouth still set against her skin. Her thighs clench again. “A man wishes to hear, lovely girl.”

“Oh  _ hells _ , Jaqen,” she groans quietly. “You can’t just  _ say _ things like that.”

He draws away from her, and she groans in disappointment this time. His expression is amused, that fucking smile with those dumb dimples back, and he tilts his head at her thoughtfully. He leans forward slowly and kisses her bottom lip where she was chewing on it, suckling on the abused flesh gently until she lets out a soft whimper. When he releases it he says, “A man wanted to do that earlier today. When he realizes it was a habit she had when she spoke.  _ He _ wanted to chew on it instead.”

“Gods, that’s  _ weird _ ,” she laughs, but it’s fucking  _ hot _ too, and her hips give a shallow half-rock against his stomach.

“Perhaps,” Jaqen says agreeably, voice warm. He kisses her bottom lip again, and then her whole mouth, tongue trailing lightly at the seam of it before he continues, “But true nonetheless.” When she moves against him again it’s his turn to groan, and he kisses her again, not forcefully but  _ completely _ , and then speaks against her lips, “A man could be content with this if you do not wish…”

Arya tugs at his hair, causing him to grunt in surprise, and holds contact with his eyes when she catches them. “I’m going to destroy you,” she tells him softly, and then purposefully presses her ass down against his crotch.

This time his kiss  _ is _ forceful, and he lets her drop a few inches down the wall, bending over her instead of holding her up. One of his knees lifts as he pushes closer, closing the scant distance between them, his upper thigh grinding between her own as his hand snakes back under her shirt. It rises, fingers questing, and goes up, and up, and up--

He lets out a long, loud groan against her mouth that makes her entire body clench with want when he realizes she’s not wearing a bra, and she smirks. “Wicked girl,” he breathes, and she rubs her chest against his own, hips working lazily against the thigh between her legs.

“We'd have just takan it off anyway. I was trying to be considerate,” she tells him sweetly, and then bites  _ his _ bottom lip.

Jaqen makes a sound like a growl and pulls away from the wall, tugging her after him, clumsily backpedaling towards the bed; he sits on it as soon as the backs of his knees meet the edge, and as soon as he sits she crawls into his lap and shoves against his shoulders, pushing him flat. He huffs out a breathy laugh and licks his lips as Arya grabs the bottom of her shirt and pulls it off, his eyes dropping down to her breasts and then flicking back up to her face with an expression of naked want.

“Wicked, wicked girl,” he whispers accusingly. He places both his hands at her sides, where her hips meet the bottom of her ribcage, and his thumbs caress the soft skin of her stomach. Those hands clench when she grinds her hips down, down and into where his cock is hard against the seat of her pants, and he hisses and watches with dark blue eyes as she lifts a hand to tug gently at one of her nipples. “She does not know what she does.”

“Yeah?” Arya asks, grinding down again. He knocks her hand away from her breast lightly and then replaces it with one of his own, running the nail of his thumb over the nipple she’d just abused, pebbled and pink. “What does she do? What do I do, Jaqen?

“She drives him to madness,” he growls, and bucks up against her. She steadies herself against him with a little gasp, hands on his chest as she works her hips against his wantonly. Her cunt is wet and aching and the soft cotton of her shorts is a lovely friction against her slick clit. She wonders, given his reaction to the revelation that she’d forgone a bra, what he’ll do when he realizes she’s lacking panties as well. She pushes the bottom of his shirt up and drags her nails across his abdomen, firm with muscles that tense and shudder beneath her touch. When he pinches the nipple he’d been playing with she lets out a startled cry and he says darkly, “A man would eat her alive.”

“So fucking do it,” she gasps, and then he lifts his hand to the back of her neck and tugs her down, kissing the breath out of her lungs, aggressive but  _ controlled _ aggression, and  _ targeted _ , each kiss and bite and scratch of his nails against her skin an economy of motion and energy, his mouth against hers a tightly contained outpouring of desire. Arya doesn’t even realize he’s wrestled her out of her shorts until he’s groaning in surprise at the reveal of her naked cunt and there are two fingers moving between her lower lips to spread moisture across her slit. “Fuck, Jaqen!”

“She will,” he promises, and then falls backwards onto the bed once more, his hands rising from her thighs to the swell of her ass and pulling her forward, up his body, and she shuffles forward obligingly with a gasp once she realizes his intention. She lowers herself against his face, calf and thigh muscles straining to keep herself upright and balanced without suffocating him, and she  _ keens _ as he directs all of that control, that  _ focus _ , to the soft wet heat between her legs.

“Oh, fuck,” she breathes, hands planted on either side of his head, trying to not pull on his long hair that’s spread around him like a halo but probably not trying as carefully as she could be. His stubble against her inner thighs is a prickly counterpoint to his tongue against her slit, both of them scraping her raw in two different ways. “Oh,  _ fuck! _ ”

She can  _ feel _ the exhale of breath from his nose against her sensitive labia and just barely keeps herself from grinding down onto his mouth. His licks are long and exploratory, tongue sliding from clit to slit and into and around with such unpredictability that she can barely keep up with the rush of pleasure, can’t force herself to concentrate on her own control, can’t feel anything beyond  _ here _ and  _ now _ and  _ him _ .

One of his hands settles on her ass, palming one of her cheeks and squeezing, kneading the skin between his calloused fingers. The other hooks up under one of her thighs, fingertips touching the wet skin of her vagina in tandem with his mouth and lips, two of them slipping up inside her alongside his tongue and stretching at her inner walls. “Jaqen,” she whines pleadingly, and the hand on her ass squeezes until it’s nearly painful and then lifts and swats, sending a line of lightning zipping up her spine until it feels like her  _ teeth _ are tingling, like her  _ hair _ has nerves.

When she comes it’s with a whimper, a soft and broken noise at odds with the way her hips rock against his chin needily, thighs clenching around his head, cunt clenching around his tongue. Maybe it’s because she only met him this morning, which feels deliciously taboo; maybe it’s because she’s naked and he’s fully dressed, something that shouldn’t be nearly as hot as it is; maybe it’s because it’s been a couple years since she’s had sex with someone who’s not Gendry, who is good but who she  _ knows _ ; whatever the reason, it’s the  _ best _ orgasm she’s had in a long time. She rides through the aftershocks, twitching against his face.

He pats her ass, gently this time, and she takes a deep breath to steady herself before swinging one of her legs away, falling from her position of straddling him to flop over onto her back, head dropping onto one of the pillows at the top of the bed. He’s breathing just as heavily as she is, his chest heaving and eyes wide as he stares up at the ceiling. He lifts a shaky hand and cards it through his hair. “Holy shit,” he says, succinctly, and it startles a laugh out of Arya. He pushes himself up onto his elbows and looks at her, wipes the back of his hand against his chin, smiling almost self-consciously. “A man should have asked before he spanked,” he tells her, sounding  _ apologetic _ for causing the orgasm of a lifetime. Arya stares at him and then laughs.

“Take your shirt off and get up here,” she commands, breathless, and Jaqen grins and obeys.

The part of Arya that works for a living, the part that observes and compartmentalizes and  _ extrapolates _ notes the handful of scars that smatter his torso. Some are light and faded with age and some of them are the soft pink of more recent wounds; in the moment that her mind dedicates to studying them, she sees that at least two look surgical, one above his left kidney and one at the line of his left pectoral. But that moment is brief, because he doesn’t stop at just his shirt, and she bites her lip in anticipation as he unbuttons his jeans and tugs them down.

He’s thick-- not as thick as Gendry, but in her experience few men are, and she doesn’t say that in an entirely flattering way because having sex with Gendry is either painful, if a predictable and anticipated sort of painful that's pleasant in it's own right because Arya has  _ problems _ , or  _ long _ and with a lot of foreplay by necessity, given their size difference in general. It’s nice, curves very lightly to the side, about average of her admittedly limited experience with cocks. Jaqen takes himself in hand and strokes, kneeling close to her eyes and staring at her intently. This time it’s her turn to swat  _ his _ hand away, and his eyes shut momentarily with a groan as she wraps her fingers around his prick. It’s smooth and warm and hard all at once and he shivers above her as she works it.

“A man did not think,” he starts, and then interrupts himself with a quiet noise of  _ want _ . “That is, he--” And then, and she smiles in surprised delight, “I--”

“I have condoms in my purse,” Arya says, taking pity on him, and he groans even louder and leans down to kiss her hard enough that her toes curl up and her vaginal muscles clench again.

“Wicked, clever, lovely girl,” he growls, nipping at her lips, and lifts himself from the bed to search her purse, still where she’d set it on the coffee table when she’d first entered the hotel room. Arya reclines on the bed, staring at his ass as he goes, one hand sliding down her stomach to play with her clit. Gods, he’s got a nice ass, one she could really sink her teeth into, thick with muscle and shapely. She wonders if he’d let her peg him. Gendry did, once, and he’d even liked it, but he’d liked the sex part of it and not the thinking about it part that came after, so they didn’t do it again.

Jaqen makes short work of the foil wrapper, sliding the condom down his cock even as he makes his way back to the bed, and he leans over her again, a hand on her knee and rising to her thigh as he kisses her, long and languid again. He must have regained some of that control from before, because when she tries to deepen the kiss, tries to tug him down over her completely he just breathes a laugh out through his nose, lips tilted into a smile against her own. His tongue curls around hers, their teeth click together lightly, his red-and-white hair falls into her face.

“Mmm,” he hums into her mouth, his voice delightfully deep and rumbly. “A man is most glad to have met you.”

She reaches between his legs, lightly touching the base of his cock. “I’ll say,” she murmurs teasingly even as he moans. But when she tries to pull him closer once more he resists, bracing against the bed.

“He would look at you,” he says quietly, and then does. His blue eyes start at her face and travel slowly down the length of her body, lingering on her lips and breasts and cunt and finishing with the tips of her toes. They curl again under the attention, and when he sees it he smiles. She takes advantage of his momentary distraction to shove him over with a hand against his shoulder. He makes a noise of surprise, his eyes widening as she pushes him up and to the side instead of pulling down like he’d been braced against, and when he falls to his back, just barely keeping from tumbling off the other side of the bed, not made widely enough for such roughhousing, she rolls on top of him, straddles his waist in an approximation of their first pose on the mattress. He stares at her in shock, clearly not having anticipated the movement, and she smirks down at him.

“So look,” she commands, and then in one swift motion lifts her hips and impales herself on his cock.

He yelps and grits his jaw, eyes clenched shut despite her demand, and his nails sink into either side of her hips, palms hot and grip tense. Arya herself flinches, vaginal walls fluttering with agitation; Jaqen may not be as big as Gendry, but maybe she’d underestimated him. Or, overestimated herself. She lifts minutely and then rocks down shallowly, hissing through her teeth, and when Jaqen sends her a look that’s half irritation and half worry she shrugs. “Oops?” she offers apologetically.

His expression becomes wry, and he mumbles something in Braavosi. Arya knows a little of the language, having spent a year learning under Syrio. Mostly she knows curse words. (After he’d died, she’d signed up for a Braavosi language course in high school, in an effort to learn more about her deceased teacher, but hearing someone else speak it  _ hurt _ , so she’d switched to Pentoshi, which as an adult she remembers so little of as to be useless.) So far as she can tell, Jaqen grumbled something about  _ courage _ and  _ sense _ .

“You are too  _ small _ for such things,” he says finally, the reproach in his voice betrayed by the aborted grinding of his groin up into hers.

Jaqen’s grip on her hips loosens and tightens in spells as Arya works herself open around the cock inside of her, her lip caught between her teeth as she lifts, falls, lifts again. He watches her, eyes drifting from her face to where his body sinks into hers and back up slowly, like he's not sure where he wants to look, which part of her he wants to devote memorization to first. Even more than Arya likes doing things that aren’t expected of her, she likes  _ control _ , and though part of her is tempted to ride him fast and hard now that she has that control, the way she would if she were with Gendry, she can’t deny how she likes the slow heady build-up, the momentum of the pace Jaqen had set for the night.

As all muscles do when they’re used, hers loosens and relaxes eventually, and she rises up higher onto her knees, until the very tip of him threatens to slide out, and then eases herself back down. It’s slow, and sensual; she can feel every inch of him like this, every twitch of his cock inside her, every clench and unclench of the muscles in his thighs and groin against her when she bottoms out. Jaqen is quiet beyond the occasional groan, and even those seem to be startled out of him, his blue eyes wide and watching her intently, seeming to drink her in.

Her second orgasm is quieter, gentler, a wave that washes over her instead of a storm that crashes and she rides him throughout it. Every jerk and spasm of her cunt around him makes Jaqen hiss out a breath and flinch as if in pain, but for the way his head falls back and his mouth drops open and his hips jerk up into hers once she’s finished. Here, finally, he seems to lose that control he’d had over himself, seems to let go of it in the face of the pleasure her body gives his. His grip on her hips tightens and he pushes her up slightly, holding her up just enough that his own have room to thrust beneath her, driving his cock deeper and higher and harder and faster, and she moans through her fluttery aftershocks.

“Arya,” he gasps finally, and it takes her a moment to realize through her own muted haze of pleasure that he’d just come.

She sits astride him for another minute, waiting for the pounding of her heart to calm. His hands run up and down her thighs and stomach, not with the same focused intention of before but more loosely, less directed, a desire just to feel her skin against his for the sole reason that it’s  _ hers _ . After a while, once she’s caught her breath, she pulls off of him with a small wince, vaginal muscles aching and squeezing down on an intrusion that isn’t there anymore. Arya collapses onto the bed, her legs tangled with his and her hair splayed over his stomach, keeping a polite distance because she doesn’t really know what the protocol is from here. Does she, like, leave? She doesn’t particularly feel like leaving.

Jaqen answers the question for her by hauling her up further on the bed and closer to him, skin sweat-slick and bodies sex-sore, and wrapping one arm around her shoulders.

“Are we good?” she whispers into the crook of his neck, and feels more than hears his quiet answering grunt, which isn’t really an answer at all. But she loses him quickly to sleep, and she’s still tucked up under his arm and their legs are still tangled together, so she supposes that’s something.

“ _ Men _ ,” she grumbles accusingly when after a minute he lets out a soft snore, and then closes her eyes as well, listening to his thudding heartbeat until sleep takes her too.

* * *

The next morning she's woken by a ringtone that she doesn't recognize. She mumbles into her pillow and reaches out, patting at the mattress beside her head where she normally keeps her phone at night, but her hand finds skin and muscle where she hadn't been expecting it. She lets out a noise of tired question before prying her eyes open. Jaqen squints down at her, looking equally befuddled, his blue eyes dull with sleep as he blinks at her a couple times.

“Oh,” she says, the memory of last night coming to her slowly. She yawns and plops her head back down onto her pillow, which is actually his chest. “I think your phone is ringing.”

Jaqen huffs out a breath before extracting himself from her, and Arya pouts into the sheets for losing her source of heat. She watches with one eye as he stretches, his back audibly popping, and shuffles naked to the coffee table where his phone vibrates across the smooth wood surface, still beeping quietly. It's not a cheerful ringtone or a song, just an understated  _ ting, ting, ting _ and he stares hard at the caller ID before picking it up and answering in muzzy Braavosi.

He leans against the table and listens to the person on the other line, eyes closed, and responds with short, sleepy murmurs, though he looks more and more awake by the second. When he glances over at her and sees her eyes open, he gestures questioningly at the little coffee pot and she gives him a thumbs up. He transfers the phone to his shoulder, looking around until he locates his pants on the floor and pulling them on and then turning to fiddle with the coffee. Arya grimaces at the thought of putting on jeans without underwear, but follows his lead by stretching out her shoulders and snagging her own shirt back.

She gets up, wincing lightly at the burn in her calves and thighs, muscles protesting the workout of the night before, and the altogether different kind of burn that his stubble had left on her neck and inner thighs. Still, it feels nice in a pleasure-pain sort of way, and she pads towards him barefooted to dig through her purse for her own phone. When she sees the time she grimaces; it's later than she was expecting, nearly eight in the morning, and almost an hour after Nymeria normally gets her breakfast. She tugs her shorts up as well and then hesitates. When Jaqen sees her fidgeting he gives her another questioning look.

“I have to let Nymeria out,” she whispers, feeling weirdly secretive, not wanting whoever Jaqen is talking to to know she's there and not really knowing why. His pride? Hers? Hell, maybe he picks up a new girl in every town he visits, she doesn't know. “Do you, uh…”  _ Do you want me to come back? _ she almost asks but doesn't.

He seems to understand what she's not asking, though, and gives her a long up and down look, then smirks and raises one eyebrow.

She glares at him and crosses her arms over her chest. She doesn't even realize she's biting her lip until he reaches out and pulls it from between her teeth with a thumb. His smirk widens when her breath catches slightly, then his brows furrow once more as he hears something he apparently doesn't like and turns away from her, speaking Braavosi into the phone with a light frown.

Arya figures that's as close to an answer as she's going to get from him, and slips out the door, the sound of the coffeemaker chugging behind her.

When she makes it back to her own room, Nymeria is splayed out across the center of the bed. She lifts her head briefly, sees Arya, and drops it back into the sheets, her tail thumping lazily. “Spoiled brat,” Arya teases as she moves towards her suitcase. Nymeria's tail thumps harder. “Do you want to  _ eat? _ ”

The dog springs to her paws and tumbles inelegantly off the bed, spinning in delighted circles as Arya pulls her food bag and bowl out of the suitcase. While Nymeria inhales her breakfast, Arya hops into the shower, washing away the dried sweat and spit from the night before, turning her face up into the hot spray of water with a contented sigh. When she finishes she takes a moment to check herself in the mirror-- no bruises on her neck and throat, courtesy of him not biting or sucking, but the skin is still raw and a bit red from his stubble rubbing against her. She does, however, have some pretty choice bruises on her hips and thighs, and she pokes at them, smiling at the dull throbs of pain.

Normally she and Nymeria go for a jog in the mornings, but given the abused feeling of her groin and thighs, Arya guiltily forgoes their traditional exercise in favor of just taking a short walk around the outside of the hotel complex. She promises to herself that she'll take the pup for an extra long romp at the dog park when they get back home. When they make their way back inside and head to the elevator, Arya contemplates taking Nymeria back to her own hotel room, but the dog's smiling face, her tongue lolling out and eyes closed as she leans against Arya's knee, makes her reconsider and a few minutes later she's knocking on Jaqen's door again, pup and all.

Nymeria ignores Jaqen the same way she ignores everyone that’s not Arya and Gendry, inspecting the room and wagging her tail and treating everything with interest but him. Arya stifles a chuckle at Jaqen's put-out expression the third time he holds his hand out for Nymeria to sniff and she dodges out of the way without even looking at him. He’d gone downstairs while she was walking her dog and brought up some food from the continental breakfast; Arya sits on the foot of the bed, legs crossed, and dunks a bagel into her coffee, watching Jaqen watch her as Nymeria investigates his dufflebag.

“So,” she says after a couple minutes.

“So,” he agrees.

Arya sniffs, takes another sip of her coffee, and then checks the time on her phone. “I’ve got a few hours before I need to head out. Want to go again?” Jaqen, who’d been picking at a lackluster bowl of fruit salad, pauses and tilts his head at her consideringly.

Five minutes later Arya pushes him away, hissing at the way his teeth tug at her nipple. “Hold on, wait--” she says, and he backs off obediently to look at her in concern. Arya pulls herself off the bed and, shirtless and grunting with exertion, hauls Nymeria up by the armpits from where she’d been laying on the floor, watching them curiously. The dog deadweights, because of course she does. “Come on you little shit,” she growls, pushing her into the bathroom and shutting the door. When she turns back to him Jaqen has fallen back on the bed, face in his hands, shoulders shaking with laughter. Arya climbs back on top of him. “I  _ can’t _ while she watches, it’s weird,” she says defensively, and then pulls his face back to her breasts with a breathless, “Alright, back you get.”

Twice more over the next few hours they bring each other off with their hands and mouths, breaking occasionally to finish eating and to bask and to chat, and after the second time she gets him off Arya swears up and down that she’s good to take him in her cunt again, trembling with anticipation and eager for something more substantial inside of her than fingers, but he just laughs into her stomach and murmurs, “A girl overestimated herself last night.” And then with a wince, “...and a man is not as young as he used to be.” She briefly thinks to argue both those points, but then his face is between her legs and his stubble is scraping her skin raw again, and she doesn’t think much of anything for a while.

It ends, of course, as all things do-- she actually  _ does _ need to get ready to leave, and maybe take Nymeria to that dog park again before they do to make up for locking her in the bathroom all morning. After she opens the bathroom door and lets the dog out (Nymeria has absolutely  _ shredded _ the toilet paper in revenge, and Arya tries to tally up how much cash she’ll need to leave a tip for the custodians of both Jaqen’s room and her own), she turns to see Jaqen shaking out her borrowed KLU shirt with a thoughtful expression. He hands it to her when she approaches him, but she can tell something is on his mind, and as she pulls it on and then shimmies back into her shorts he asks, “Has a man… hmm. That is, does a girl--”

“I didn’t cheat on anybody with you, if that’s what you’re about to ask,” she says mildly, hunting for her socks.

“A man merely wishes to know if he should expect a scorned lover to come after him.”

She finally finds them beneath the bed, and pops back up with a triumphant noise. Then she smirks at him. “A man doesn’t need to worry. Not about  _ me _ , anyway. Whoever you spoke to on the phone seemed pretty heated.” He gives her an amused look but says nothing. “Alright, alright, I get it. No work talk.”

“Why does a girl think it was a man’s work?” Jaqen asks, lounging backwards on the bed. Unlike her, he has nowhere to be any time soon, and is still as naked as the day he was born and utterly shameless about it. Arya reasons that when you look as good as he does, you're allowed to be a little shameless. “Perhaps a man’s  _ wife _ called to check in on him, wondering when he was to return.”

Arya tilts her head at him thoughtfully. “No,” she says after a moment. “I don’t think so. You don’t seem the type.”

A smile curls across his mouth. “Just so,” he murmurs, and then beckons her back to the bed. She snorts and goes, and when she reaches him she bends down, hands braced on the mattress to either side of him. Jaqen lifts a hand and runs it through her hair, eyes tracking the progress of his fingers before returning to her own. “A man is most pleased to have met you, Arya Stark,” he says quietly, and she leans down just enough to give him a slow, deep kiss.

“Let me know if you’re ever in King’s Landing,” Arya says against his lips, and then kisses him again, shorter and with a bit of a bite. Then she stands back up and says, “Nymeria, to me,” and clips the leash back on the dog’s harness. “Good luck with your writing,” she tells Jaqen as she opens the hotel door, and hears the heady rumble of his laughter as she closes it behind her.

* * *

The bus ride home is long and boring. Her thighs ache the entire time, and she thinks of laughing blue eyes and red-and-white hair and a dimpled smile.

She saves his contact in her phone as A Man.

 

* * *

Arya rents a single-story townhouse on the outskirts of the city proper, still well within the high walls but not in one of the outer neighborhoods, where the urban businesses just start to meet suburbia. It’s an older building, with poor insulation and in an area that’s gotten more commercial as the years have passed, one of the few privately-owned structures along the street she lives on. Two bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, with a decently sized kitchen and a den area big enough to fit a couch and their television. Hardwood floors. A washer and dryer, thank the gods. Sansa's flat lacks laundry hookups, and she comes by once a week with a hamper of dirty clothes to use Arya's. All the rooms are weirdly spaced and sectioned off from each other, a product of the architectural experimentation of yesteryear's generation, to the point where it can get difficult to hear Gendry talking from the den if she’s in the kitchen. Shouting across the house is common, and often necessary. Thankfully it's two residents are both naturally loud people. There had been another home adjoining it, once, the way townhouses tend to do, but that one apparently had a tree fall through the roof years before Arya had moved in and had been given up and demolished as a result, leaving her tiny little home to itself.

The rent is shockingly low, until one considers the fact that it’s only a block away from a busy intersection and therefore traffic is  _ abominable _ , and also the previously mentioned poor insulation. But Arya doesn’t drive, doesn’t even have a license, and uses public transit for anywhere she needs to get that isn’t within walking distance, so the issue of traffic is negligible; and she’s from the North, so poor insulation in winter is even more of a non-issue. Southron winters do little more than make her laugh. The pitiful snow that King’s Landing occasionally gets often completely shuts the city down as everyone loses their shit, and Arya Stark just laughs and laughs and laughs and wears her t-shirts and jeans while the people passing her on the street bundle up in layers of clothes.

It’s pretty cheap for the area and she can afford it without having to ask her parents for money, even with her inconsistent income where she can go a month without getting a decent paycheck. And it has a yard, a rare find within the high walls of the city; a tiny little thing in the front and a slightly larger fenced-in one in the back where Nymeria can occasionally be convinced to pop a squat when it’s raining and Arya doesn’t feel like taking her for a full walk. A block from a little grocer where she buys food, three blocks from a dog park where Nymeria can get her zooms out, four from the auto shop that Gendry works at and four in the opposite direction is Hot Pot’s bakery. She’s only met her landlord a handful of times since she moved in, which seems to work well enough for the both of them. Sure, it can get a little drafty on windy days, and they’ve had to fix a couple leaks in the roof over the years, and sometimes between the two of them and the dog it feels like they’re all moving around each other nuts to butts, but it’s home.

When they get back, Nymeria bolts from the Uber as soon as Arya opens the door and sprints up the driveway to the townhouse, barking the whole way. Arya thanks the driver profusely and gives him a hefty tip for putting up with the excitable dog-- normally, Nymeria is very well-mannered, but she's spent the last few days cooped up in various means of public transit, and she's got too much energy built up for patience. She spins in a dozen tight circles at the front door, wagging her tail wildly, and when Arya follows after her, laden with the weight of her suitcase and carry-on bag, the pup turns and bounds back towards her, tongue lolling and golden eyes bright.

“I know, baby girl,” she says with a grin, “I'm happy to be home too.” Having been adequately acknowledged, Nymeria goes back to her raucous bouncing, and Arya looks away from her when she hears a door open ahead of them. Gendry steps out of the house, a smile on his face and arms crossed over his chest, and when he reaches her he takes the suitcase out of her hand.

“Hey,” he says, wrapping his other arm around her shoulder and shaking her lightly. “Welcome home.” Nymeria has already run into and back out of the house and now stands halfway out of the door, squirming in place and barking at him eagerly. As the two of them near the door she disappears back through it and out of sight, though Arya can hear the clatter of nails against the hardwood floor and the sudden onslaught of squeaking that suggests Nymeria has started tearing into her toy box. “Good bus ride?”

“Fair enough,” she answers with a sigh, stretching as she tosses her carry-on tote bag onto the couch in the den. The muscles in her thighs and groin twinge with the pleasant pain of recent overuse, and for a brief moment Arya bites her lip and ducks her head to avoid looking at Gendry. She’s not embarrassed or ashamed. She’s  _ not _ . Moving further into the house proves that Nymeria is indeed rooting through her toy box, throwing out her menagerie of squeaky plush toys and thick tug-of-war ropes, occasionally holding onto one long enough to growl and give it a good shake before flinging it to the side and going for the next. It’s a constant battle with her, keeping the floors clean, between the toys and the tufts of shed fur. She peeks out of the corners of her eyes to see Gendry’s reaction, which can only be described as an indulgent half-grimace; Gendry’s the one that does most of the battling, after all. “My whole body hurts, though, I feel like I’ve done nothing but sit in a tin can for the last two days. I don’t know if I want to go for a jog or sleep for a week. I  _ definitely _ want a shower.”

Gendry snorts. He sets her suitcase down against the door of her room, the one that used to be  _ their _ room. “Bathroom’s all yours,” he tells her with a shrug, continuing through the house and into the kitchen. She follows, collapsing in one of the wooden chairs at the table and throwing her feet out, feeling the stretch of her calves and hamstrings. He snorts again at her dramatics and leans against the counter, arms crossed again. “I don’t know how you make the trip up there as often as you do,” he says with a shrug, and she fixes him with a look.

“I haven’t visited Jon in almost a year!”

“Twice in a year is two more trips in a year than I’d make,” he tells her idly. She rolls her eyes and rises back to her feet, stretching again. A shower actually sounds fucking great right now. She head to the bathroom and turns the hot water on and then goes to collect a towel. When Gendry starts talking again, she pauses once more in the kitchen; it’ll take a few minutes for the water to heat up in the old pipes, anyway. “Hey, so, I’d meant to pick up some stuff to make dinner tonight, but…” Helplessly, he raises his hands and she rolls her eyes at him.

“But you forgot,” she finishes, and Gendry at least has the decency to smile sheepishly at her.

“I am but a man,” he says mildly, “and man is fallible.”

_ A man _ . Arya has the sudden memory of Jaqen’s mouth against hers, against her throat, against her breasts. His lips kissing, sucking, moving as he murmured terrible, horrible,  _ amazing _ things into her skin.  _ A man did not think. A man would eat her alive. A man wishes to hear. _ She draws her lower lip between her teeth and chews it, imagines for a brief moment that she can still taste him there.

_ A man is most glad to have met you. _

Gendry, thankfully, is oblivious. He’s turned away from her and is shuffling through the collection of takeout menus they’ve acquired over the years, still speaking to her, none the wiser to her sudden lapse in concentration. “So I was thinking about getting something delivered maybe? Less trouble than cooking, and like a welcome-back kind of thing. I know it was only a couple weeks but it feels like you were gone for  _ forever _ . I’ve almost gotten used to not having to fish dog hair out of my coffee.” He settles on a few choices, puts a couple of the menus back, and says, “The Astapori place has a dinner special going on, but I know how weird you are about eating dog. Oh, speaking of dogs, Sandor poked his ugly head into the shop today, nearly made my boss shit himself. Thought you’d be back yesterday, wanted me to let you know to call him. Weird guy. Hmm. How do you feel about Dothraki barbeque? Could get Khal’s Kitchen, but they don’t deliver this far away, we’d have to go pick it up--”

“I slept with someone last night,” Arya blurts suddenly. Then she winces and curses herself.

Gendry turns to face at her slowly, blinking in confusion. He hesitates, then sets the menus in his hands down on the counter and leans against it a bit more heavily. “Okay,” he says after a couple moments, drawing out the word. In the background, the shower pipes chug a couple times.

Arya is so, so pissed at herself. It wasn’t any of his business. Why the  _ fuck _ did she tell him? They’re not, like, together. It doesn’t matter if she slept with someone. It doesn’t matter if she’d fucked a different person every night. It’s her decision, and she doesn’t owe him anything. They’re not even  _ together _ . She  _ broke up _ with him.  _ Why the fuck did she tell him _ .

“I just,” she starts, and then cuts herself off. She feels guilty in her heart and she doesn’t really know  _ why _ . She chews on her lip even harder.

“Okay,” Gendry says, sounding a little more grounded than he had before. When she musters up the courage to look at him his jaw is tight and his brows are drawn down, but when they make eye contact he just nods at her, the motion almost idle, as if he’s unaware that he’s doing it. “Okay,” he says again.

She won’t apologize. She has nothing to apologize for. She  _ won’t _ .

She doesn’t apologize. She just stares at him and waits.

“Okay,” he says finally, and nods a bit more firmly.

“You said that,” she points out, and his eyes narrow into a glare. “A couple times.”

“Did you wear a condom?” he asks pointedly, almost accusingly, and Arya feels her hackles rise before she forces herself to take a deep breath. He’s allowed to ask that. It makes sense. They still have sex sometimes. She gives a jerky nod, and he continues to glare at her for a long, awkward moment before letting out an explosive sigh and letting his head drop back so he’s staring at the ceiling. “Okay,” he says to the popcorn paint above them. Arya opens her mouth. “I  _ know _ , Arya, I know I just said that.” Arya shuts her mouth.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asks finally, and Arya lets herself feel miserable for a couple indulgent seconds before she draws herself up and forces it away. She’s got a box in her heart where she shoves everything that she compartmentalizes and she puts her guilt in it now, because she has nothing to feel guilty about anyway. She’s an adult and so is he, and they’re not dating anymore. She doesn’t owe him  _ anything _ .

She shrugs.

Gendry stares at her hard and crosses his arms over his chest again. They look at each other without saying anything for an awkward minute, made more awkward by the squeaking in the den as Nymeria reacquaints herself with her toys and the sound of spraying water from the bathroom. Finally, Gendry gives another slow nod and says, watching her carefully as he speaks, “I slept with Bella while you were gone.”

There’s a  _ flare _ in her gut, one that clenches and hisses angrily, a sharp vindictive stab that whispers  _ how dare he, how  _ dare _ he _ , before she swallows it down. She has to grit her teeth against it; she imagines suddenly that her expression may nearly mirror his own of a couple minutes ago when she’d first given her admission. Still, that anger controls her enough that she parrots back at him nastily, “Did you wear a condom?”

His jaw tightens again, but he nods as well.

“Okay,” she says.

They stare at each other. Arya wonders what he’s thinking, if he hates her the way he did after she first broke up with him. She wonders if this will be the thing that makes him leave again. She’s expecting it. She’s dreading it. They’re not together, but he’s  _ hers _ , and even if she can’t love him the way he wants her to love him, she still  _ needs _ him.

Gendry lets out a sudden, loud sigh and runs a hand through his dark hair, ruffling it. She knows that he does that when he’s stressed. He turns back to the menus on the counters and looks at them instead of her. When he speaks, his voice is quiet but firm. “I don’t think we should sleep together anymore. We shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place.”

She draws in a sharp breath, and he glances at her at the sound. Gendry says this a lot. They fight and they fuck, or they drink a little and they fuck, or one of them has a bad day and they fuck, and it feels  _ good _ , his body against hers feels  _ right _ , but it hurts too. Because part of him is still in love with her, and she doesn’t know how to fix that. So afterwards he gets upset, says they’re not doing that again, and she hums and agrees and they both know full well they’ll fall into bed again sooner or later. Because that's what they do. That's what they've always done.

Right now, though, it sounds like he might actually mean it. She nods without meeting his eye.

“Okay,” he says simply. Then he swallows audibly, clears his throat, and says with forced cheer, “Braavosi? About as different from Northern cuisine as you can get. I’m sure you’re sick of mutton, and I know you like your spice.”

She hesitates, then nods again even though Braavosi just makes her think of Jaqen, which isn't helping the wretched guilt in her heart that  _ shouldn't be there _ , and agrees carefully, “Okay.”

* * *

That night after they eat, Gendry gets a couple of fingers of whiskey in him, and then he gets a couple of his fingers in her. When he was little his mom drank a lot and so as an adult he drinks sparingly, and when he does he either gets mean or he gets horny or he gets mean and horny. He doesn’t like it, he  _ hates _ it, which is why he doesn't drink often, but Arya knows how to deal with it so she doesn’t really care. She’d rather him be a mean drunk than a weepy one.

He’s angry, she can  _ taste _ it when he kisses her. Jaqen had kissed her the way he’d flirted with her; like it was second nature, as easy as breathing, like his desire was a given. Languid, but focused. Consuming, but tempered. He’d kissed generously, like he’d had all the time in the world, like he could have contented himself with just his mouth on hers and have been no less pleased with only that than if he’d fucked her. Gendry kisses like he’s proving a point.  _ See? _ his lips say against hers without speaking.  _ See what you’re missing? Look at me. See what I’m worth? See what I can do? Do you see? Look. Do you see me? See? _

Arya is no blushing virgin, and she gives as good as she gets; she snaps and growls and digs her nails into his back.  _ I see _ , she says with her teeth. When he gets his cock in her, thick and hard and bigger than Jaqen’s by simple virtue of the fact that everything about Gendry is bigger anyway, she throws her head back and gasps, fingers gripping his hair. It hurts, a different kind of hurt than fucking Jaqen had, and Arya contemplates briefly how  _ fucked up _ she is that she  _ likes it _ . He finds her neck, bites into it, rakes his teeth across her skin, marking her in all the places Jaqen didn't, his hips moving punishingly against hers, ramming up into her painfully. It’s vicious. She  _ revels _ in it. Everything is sweaty and sticky and Arya yanks his head up, presses her mouth against his, not kissing, both their mouths parted and teeth clicking together, ferocious and sharp, breathing each other’s air.

_ Do you see me? What I can do? _ he asks with his eyes, narrowed, brows pulled down, expression tight and tense.

_ I see, _ she answers with hers.

She’ll let him decide if what she sees is worth much of anything.


	2. Chapter 2

Arya had met Gendry when she was ten and he was sixteen.

Bran was in and out of the hospital, and it was a hard time for everyone in the Stark family, which as an adult Arya can recognize a lot better than she'd been able to as a child. At the time she'd just been  _ furious _ about everything, about Bran being sick and Jon going to the Wall and her feeling hopeless and stupid and Father having to come out of retirement to keep up with hospital bills and Mother ignoring her because she had more important things to do and children that she liked more than Arya to take care of. So Arya was loud and angry and spiteful, because she was hurting too and nobody was acknowledging it, and when the new school year started Catelyn enrolled her in the same posh all-girls charter school that Sansa went to and shipped her off to King's Landing to get her out of the way.

At least, that's how it'd felt at the time.

Maegor's was ridiculously upscale and the Stark family had been donors for generations, so some strings were pulled and Arya had been placed in a dorm room with Sansa even though they were several years apart in age, which everyone except the girls in question had probably seen as a favor to them. But Sansa and Arya had  _ never _ gotten along, and Arya was stuck with  _ her _ and her favorite brother was as far North as North goes and her second favorite brother was fucking  _ dying  _ in Winterfell, and Arya was trapped in stupid King's Landing with stupid  _ Sansa _ .

From the time the first semester had started she skipped school often and spent a lot of time wandering the city. She hated the place on the principal that it wasn't _ home _ , but she couldn't deny that it was beautiful in a metropolitan sort of way; in the North, cities aged more slowly than Southron ones, and Arya was in awe of the way time and culture had evolved the architecture, the way skyscrapers brushed against old stone septs that had stood for a thousand years, how brick shops so ancient they'd had to be refurbished almost completely to be used sat beside shiny new Costcos and Blockbusters at traffic lights. Sometimes, people took notice of a little ten year old girl wandering the streets on her own. Sometimes those people were kindly. Sometimes they weren't. Arya learned pretty quickly how to not draw unwanted attention; and she learned pretty quickly how to run if she did.

Gendry lived in Flea Bottom, the part that actually had fleas and hadn't yet been subject to the gentrification the district would see in the coming decade. His mom rented a tiny little one-story house with a garage, which is where Arya had seen him for the first time, the garage door open and Gendry on one of those little rolly things underneath a beat up old Rambler that even Arya could tell had seen better days. It was swelteringly hot that day, the back of her tank top stuck to her shoulder blades with sweat, and outside Gendry's house was a little tree, and she was bored as fuck and not ready to return to Maegor's for the tonguelashing she knew she'd get for skipping class again, so she stopped beneath the tree and watched the teenager under the car curse and spit about something.

Arya had heard curse words before, of course, from her older brothers and occasionally her father, and her mother had told her that young ladies shouldn't say such nasty things, but her mother wasn't here and Arya was  _ ten _ so she wasn't  _ young _ anymore, and she'd never been a particularly good lady besides. The boy reached for a tool just too far away for him to grab and he hissed, “Stupid cunt.”

Arya knew her bitches and her shits and her fucks even better than she knew her pleases and thank-yous, but she'd never heard that one before, so she'd called out to him, “What's cunt?” And Gendry had shrieked in surprise and tried to sit up and smacked his idiot hard head against the undercarriage of the Rambler.

(Once, Rodrik had chuckled over Arya's head and asked her father, “She never meets a stranger, does she?” Arya had thought that was a stupid thing to say; she met tons and tons of strangers, she just liked to talk to them until they weren't strangers anymore. Then Rodrik had said, “She'll be trouble,” and Arya had agreed with  _ that _ assessment wholeheartedly.)

Gendry had pulled himself out from beneath the car, eyes wide and rubbing his forehead. He stared at her across the street before asking in confusion, “What?”

Arya rolled her eyes-- clearly he'd heard her, or he wouldn't have jumped and hurt himself. “What's. Cunt.” She spoke slowly so maybe he'd get it that time.

And that's how they'd met. Gendry blushed and told her he shouldn't have said that word and she shouldn't repeat it on account of how she was a lady, and she called him stupid and then said it five times in a row just to spite him, cunt cunt cunt cunt  _ cunt _ , and he said “Nevermind, you're not a lady, you're a  _ gremlin _ ,” and she'd puffed up with pride.

Then his mother had come out of the house and seemed just so  _ delighted _ that her son was  _ talking to someone _ , even if that someone was visibly half a decade younger than him, and she ignored when both Arya and Gendry claimed they didn't know each other and invited Arya in for lemonade. And Arya shrugged, ‘cause she liked lemonade, and went inside while Gendry gaped at them both in shock.

Arya learned very quickly that there was little Gendry could deny his mother, and his mother liked her, and his mother especially liked that Gendry was  _ engaging _ with someone in a healthy and productive way (his mom's words and nobody else's), so Arya went back to that little house in Flea Bottom regularly enough that she and Gendry became sort of friends based entirely on proxy and the fact that her being there kind of irritated him, which kind of amused her. Gendry reminded her of Jon, sort of, in that they were both dark haired and a bit sullen and that he occasionally spoke in tandem with her, the way Jon would. She liked watching him play video games and she liked watching him help his mom cook dinner and she liked watching him try to fix that dumb Rambler in the garage.

And, strangely, when school let out that year and she went back home to Winterfell for summer break, she missed him. She missed him when she had to babysit Rickon because everyone else was at the hospital and she missed him when she'd ask Robb if she could watch him play Grand Theft Auto and he'd tell her it wasn't for kids and she'd miss him when she sat beside Bran's bed and held his cool limp little hand. And when the summer was over and she went back to King's Landing to her stupid dorm with her stupid sister, she skipped school on the very first day and went to Gendry's, and his mom ruffled her hair and told her to visit  _ after _ school next time, and then Arya hopped up beside Gendry on the couch and watched him play Assassin's Creed.

Gendry's mom got very sick very suddenly and then died very quickly a couple months after he turned eighteen, old enough to be a responsible adult in theory but young enough to be a terrible one in practice. It had been during summer break and Arya hadn’t had a cell phone yet, so she didn’t know until the school year had started again and she’d come back to King’s Landing and popped by his house to say hello. It was awkward without his mom around. Arya still visited, but he didn't talk much, and at first she resented him a little because she was trying to get  _ away _ from medical bullshit and taking care of people, but unlike her family Gendry  _ needed _ her, even if it was just to keep him company. So she came after school and sometimes instead of school, and she yelled at him to eat something and told him to shower because he hadn't bathed in a few days and he stank.

When he was twenty she was fourteen, and he was basically her only friend in King's Landing and she was basically his only friend at all even though he was an adult and she was a kid, which probably didn't say much to his credit. She didn't care though. He was  _ Gendry _ , and most of the time he didn't treat her like a kid, and when he did she just yelled at him until he stopped. It was a good arrangement, she thought. He sold the house he'd grown up in, and also that stupid Rambler, and moved into an apartment, and Arya had a lot of firsts in that apartment. Her first taste of alcohol, her first blunt, her first time sleeping in the same bed with a guy who she wasn't related to. And then later, her first kiss, first fuck, and first heartbreak, all in one day; Arya didn't have much reason to go back to that apartment, after that.

They popped in and out of each other's lives over the years. Gendry got a GED. Arya got a dog. Gendry got an art degree. Arya got a townhouse. He dated Bella and Tansy and Willow, she dated Denyo and Lyanna and Olyvar, and they pretended to be happy for each other. Neither of them ever apologized. Neither of them ever forgave. Neither of them ever forgot. By the time they'd moved in together and then later actually started dating, when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-eight, they were good at hurting each other. They'd had a lot of time to practice.

 

* * *

 

\-- _ We get together, oh, we get together, but separate's always better when there's feelings-- _

“I hate this fucking song,” Sandor says, shoving a handful of fries into his mouth.

“You hate everything,” Arya says wryly, her eyes closed behind her sunglasses.

They're sitting in Sandor's car in the neighborhood by the Mud Gate where that prostitute got shanked last week, parallel parked with the engine running along the side of the road with a super-sized bag of McDonalds settled over the emergency brake between them. Sandor is like probably two-thirds sodium and cholesterol at this point, considering how much fried shit he eats. Arya is convinced that he's just bullied his organs into submission over the years. Somewhere nearby, blaring through the open window of one of the apartments along the street,  _ Hey Ya _ by Outkast has been playing on repeat for the last twenty minutes. Arya doesn’t mind the song personally, it ‘bumps’ as the children say these days, but after the fourth time it’d played she’d lost her taste for it as well.

“Gonna fucking shout at those fuckers until they play some other fucking song,” he growls.

“No,” she says dryly, “you and I both are going to suck it up and deal with it like adults.”

“Fuck you, you shitting clot. I piss kidney stones bigger and nastier than you, you skinny little cuntfuck.” A moment passes and he reaches for more fries. Finally, “You know what else I hate?”

Arya sighs. “My peace of mind?”

_ \--Don't want to meet your daddy-- _

“These bastard Facebook skips. Social media is ruining this job. Back in my day--”

“--you hunted through dumpsters and used bloodhounds and chased people on foot, uphill both ways, in the snow.” She turns, tipping her sunglasses down to glare at him over the tops. “You're the only person I've ever met who bitches that their job is  _ too easy _ .” He glares back at her and shoves another bunch of fries into his fat ugly gob.

“Used to be a job you could be proud of,” he grumbles. “Used to take  _ effort _ . Now any fat cunt can get on Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram or whatever and find someone.”

Nymeria leans up from the back seat and pokes her head in between them, sniffing pointedly at the bag. Sandor gives her a fry, completely ignoring Arya’s affronted, “Hey, she can’t eat that!” Nymeria turns to look at Arya and tilts her head, her big golden eyes watery and wide, and Arya pushes her back into the backseat by her nose. “No begging!” She gives Sandor a hateful look. “If your panties are that wadded up over it then do it the old fashioned way.”

He gives a booming laugh, and outside the car a woman passing by must hear it through the windows because she turns to look at them nervously. “ _ Fuck _ that! I found Polliver in less than an hour. Knobgobbler was on Twitter this morning. Can’t beat that.”

Arya stares at him disbelievingly. “Then stop  _ bitching _ about it!”

“No,” Sandor says simply, shrugging.

Sandor Clegane is a shit and a half, but he took Arya under his burnt-up wing after she’d stumbled ass over elbows through her first skip job. When he was still a detective inspector in the KLPD they’d called him the Hound, because he could sniff out anything and anyone if you gave him enough time. She’s made some good contacts through him, and they work fairly well together when they aren’t trying to tear each other apart. Plus, Nymeria likes him. Probably because he feeds her fries.

“Gods I hate you,” Arya growls at him. “I was in a good fucking mood and everything, then I saw your ugly mug and heard your nasty voice, and now I want to die.”

_ \-- _ _ what makes it, then what makes love the exception?-- _

“Shut the fuck up.” Sandor glances the clock on his dashboard and then leans forward, squinting over the steering wheel. They’re waiting outside of a gym that Polliver Hill frequents, one that Sandor claims he’ll be visiting this afternoon. Polliver was arrested three months ago for aggravated assault; he’d gotten spectacularly hammered at a bar and smashed a chair over a waitress’s head, putting her in the hospital with significant cranial damage, as well as wounding two other patrons. He’d been released on a twenty-five thousand dollar bail, made his first two monthly pretrial check-ins, then went off the radar, leaving one Tyrion Lannister, bail bonds agent, out the cash.

A man exits the gym, bald head shining in the sun and heading down the sidewalk towards them, and Sandor points to him. Not that Arya needs it; she’d studied Polliver’s mugshots last night. “There he is,” the Hound says with grim satisfaction. He settles back into his seat with a sigh and reaches for another handful of fries. “Go get ‘em, bait dog.”

Arya gives him one last glare before pulling off her sunglasses to toss them into his lap and opening the door, stepping out from the car.

The Hound calls her bait dog because she’s tiny. He always makes a point to clarify that-- she’s not bait because she’s cute, she’s bait because she’s tiny. He also makes a point to clarify that she’s not cute, and she’s really quite horsey and ugly and if he had a picture of her he might save it to wipe his ass with if he ever ran out of toilet paper. Arya even likes that sometimes, how honest Clegane is about how he feels. She knows she’s tiny, and she knows she’s not especially intimidating, and she knows she’s not pretty. People aren’t threatened by her. It works to her advantage, usually.

When she draws close, walking in the opposite direction of Polliver and due to pass him, she wavers slightly to the right, just enough to bump into his arm. “Excuse me,” she says nervously, stumbling away from him. Polliver looks like he wants to give her a hard shove, but instead just grunts.

“Watch where you’re going,” he tells her sharply, but when he realizes that she hasn’t moved and is still staring at him he turns back to her and snaps, “ _ What? _ ”

“Are you Polliver Hill?” Somewhere behind them, the song restarts again.

_ \-- _ _ One, two, three! Unh! My baby don't mess around-- _

He draws himself up, squares his shoulders and stares down at her menacingly. “Why? Who the fuck are you?”

Arya fidgets anxiously and steps forward, getting closer towards him. Polliver raises an eyebrow but doesn't step back, curious despite himself; he has previous charges of sexual assault and battery against working women. He probably likes that she’s nervous, the absolute fuck. “I, um, think we might have a mutual friend?”

He crosses his arms over his chest and leans his weight onto one hip. “Oh yeah? Who’s that?”

Arya gives him a tremulous smile. “He lives up on the High Hill? I think he’d really like to talk to you.”

Polliver leans over her, uses his superior height to his advantage. When he speaks, his voice is soft and smooth with menace. “Spit it out, slut, before I cut your cunt till it meets your ass and you have one hole instead of two.”

Her smile is stronger this time. “Tyrion Lannister?”

She sees the exact moment that he realizes who, and what, she is. She also sees that split second decision, that razor’s edge where he tries to choose between fight or flight. She  _ lives _ for that razor’s edge. She hopes he picks fight.

Polliver turns tail and runs. Arya gives herself a moment to heave a disappointed sigh before taking off after him. He has longer legs, but the disadvantage of being surprised, and makes the mistake of looking over his shoulder after only a few paces and stumbles. She gains ground quickly, turning and shoving her shoulder hard into his side and upsetting his balance enough that he falls to the sidewalk with a shout. The street around them clears rapidly, people darting out of the way and dispersing, nobody wanting to get caught in the fuss. It’s not a great neighborhood, and it's residents are probably used to scuffles and have learned how to avoid them. Polliver lands on his left hip and yelps, but when Arya reaches him he grabs at her ankle, nails digging into the skin viciously as he tugs to try to bring her down to the ground with him. She jerks away before rearing back and kicking him hard in the kidney.

He groans, curling in on himself, and she kicks at him again, planting her foot on his ribcage and shoving him onto his stomach. She drops down on top of him, breathing heavily, and drives her left knee into the center of his shoulder blades, leaning all of her weight down on it. Polliver claws at the sidewalk, but Arya reaches out and grabs his wrists, and there is a brief struggle where his raw physical strength works against gravity pressing her weight down onto him, but after a few moments where the both of them grunt with exertion she manages to wrestle his wrists to the small of his back and pins those beneath her knee, too. He bucks, trying to throw her off, and she punches him at the base of his skull. Dazed, he stills long enough for her to get the handcuffs out of the back pocket of her jeans and around his wrists with a click.

“Fuck,” he pants into the sidewalk. “Fuck.”

“Shouldn’t have run,” she tells him. “Always makes it harder when you fuckers run.”

Polliver goes limp on the ground with a reedy, “Fuck.”

“Heh heh heh,” Arya hears above her, and when she looks up Clegane is standing behind her, McDonalds bag in his hand and an ugly smile on his face. He brings a couple fries up to his mouth and says meanly, chewing, “I fucking love this job.” Then he crumples the bag in his hands and tosses it at a nearby trash can. It misses, but he doesn't pick it up. Shithead.

“Hey Sandor,” Arya says, rising her to feet as he bends down to haul Polliver up by his cuffed wrists. She pats the dust off of her pants and shakes out her hair. Sandor gives a questioning grunt. “What’s cooler than being cool?”

He sends her a strange look before his face clouds over, “Seven hells, Arya--”

_ \--Ice cold!  _ _ Alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alri-- _

“I  _ will _ hit you,” he tells her threateningly, yanking Polliver to his feet and towards the car. Nymeria’s head pokes out the back window, tongue lolling out lazily, and Sandor shoos her over against the far side of the backseat as he opens the door and shoves Polliver in next to her. “If he breathes wrong, eat his face,” he commands the dog. Nymeria just sniffs the newcomer for a moment before losing interest, but Polliver flinches back nonetheless.

Arya flops down into the passenger seat with a sigh and Clegane gives her a disgusted look at he drops into the drivers’. “You’re getting lazy,” he says accusingly.

“I just came back from vacation, bite me.” She grabs her sunglasses where they’re resting on the dashboard and shoves them back onto her face, glances briefly around the console, then looks over at him with a frown. “Did you not leave me any fries? You absolute fucker. I did all the hard work.”

Sandor just sniffs at her derisively. “I bought them. And this is  _ my _ contract, I’m just sharing it with you.”

“I was going to check in,” Polliver says desperately from the backseat as Sandor puts the car in drive and glances over his shoulder to check the road behind them, easing out of the parking spot.

“Shut the fuck up,” he says mildly. “Gods alive I hate parallel parking.” When he’s finally maneuvered them back onto the road he rolls his window down and screams out it, “ _ Change the bloody song you fucking cunts! _ ”

“I didn’t even realize I’d missed my date-- tell Lannister it’s a misunderstanding.”

Polliver continues in a similar vein as they barrel down the street, and Arya drowns it out by saying, “I may get that song saved on my phone. I think I miss it now that it’s gone.” Clegane shoots her a nasty look as behind them, Polliver switches from bargaining to bribing.

“Look, I can pay you, I’m just waiting for my boss to contact me. You just tell  _ your _ boss I’ll reschedule my court date and he can get his money back, and once that’s all settled I’ll make sure you get paid for the hassle, alright?”

“Shut the  _ fuck _ up before I let the little girl punch you again,” Sandor snaps, and Arya bristles.

“Hey, hold on! You don’t  _ let _ me do anything! I’ll punch him if I want to!” Then she turns and glares at Hill. “And I  _ will _ punch you. I know about that hooker you beat last year, so don’t think I won’t.”

“She fleeced me! If you paid someone to do a job and they ran off with your money, you’d--”

Arya lets out a short shrill whistle, and Nymeria begins growling deep in her throat, lips peeled back to show the pinks of her gums and her pearly white teeth. Polliver goes silent. “Heel,” Arya commands after a few seconds, and Nymeria quiets. Arya hasn’t  _ actually _ trained her to attack on command, just to growl, since she legally can’t be used to apprehend people, but she makes for an excellent deterrent.

“Heh heh,” Sandor chuckles again. He thinks it’s the funniest thing when she uses the dog. “Alright, Hill, don’t go pissing your pants in my backseat. Hells but I’m hungry again. And I could use a beer.”

“It’s not even noon yet, you lush.” While she's talking her phone buzzes from its spot in one of the cup holders in the console. She means to keep berating him, but when she picks her phone up and checks the message, she trails off with a bit of a grin.

**FROM [A Man]** :  _  Reached the end of a book. This man was reminded that he was supposed to contact you then. _

**TO [A Man]** :  _ Took you awhile to finish it _

**FROM [A Man]** :  _ He has been busy, lovely girl. _

**TO [A Man]** :  _ work? _

**FROM [A Man]** :  _ Just so. _

**TO [A Man]** :  _ GL with your writing. Am also working atm. Nymeria says hello. Was the book good? _

**FROM [A Man]** :  _ A very interesting read. :) Made more interesting by a man’s recent introduction to a Stark girl. _

**TO [A Man]** :  _ Don’t believe anything you read about the red wedding. my father swears up and down ye olde frey had cholera and shat himself to death during the ceremony _

Arya bites at her lip and looks away from her phone to see Sandor squinting at her suspiciously. She flinches and then draws herself up defensively. “What the fuck do you want?”

He turns his eyes back to the road and gives an exaggerated shrug. “Are you and Waters back together or something? I’ll send him a get well soon card. Gods know he’ll need it. You’re smiling at your phone like a lovesick numpty. Nothing good’ll come of that.”

“The hell I am! And I’m not back together with Gendry. Gods.”

“The hell you  _ are _ ,” he insists, and when they pull up to a stoplight he goes back to squinting at her. “If not Gendry, who? I thought he was the only one stupid enough to try getting in your pants.” At her offended huff he shrugs again. “What? They’d have to be stupid to let their cock get anywhere near you, you’re crazy. I bet your twat has teeth.”

Behind them, Polliver inhales to say something, and Arya interrupts him by turning in her seat and giving him a hard stare. When she turns back to Sandor he’s smirking nastily. Gods, she hates him. “I’ve had sex loads of times. Like, a lot of it. Probably more than you, you ugly fuck. Never had any complaints.” Sandor’s smirk grows and Arya groans in frustration. “Just get us to the station,” she snaps and hunkers down into her seat, arms crossed tight over her chest.

Arya doesn’t often do skip jobs like this one. Her purview is more petty crime, smaller offenses with less dangerous offenders. Lots of people with traffic violations who forget their court date. A couple B-and-E’s. Public indecency and the like. Most of the time her job involves a lot less chasing and punching and a lot more tuning people out as they apologize incessantly. Tyrion doesn’t like giving her the more dangerous contracts, which she personally thinks is just stupid sexism disguised as chivalry, but on the whole she  _ likes _ Tyrion, because he tends to be choosy about the people he agrees to bail. Sandor takes contracts from both him and Petyr Baelish, who works regularly with rapers and murderers and grand arsonists and kid fuckers, and who Arya personally wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, but Sandor’s been doing the job a lot longer than she has so he’s used to dealing with scummier people.

Sometimes, like today, Sandor lets her come along with him and take the lead, get some experience with the more nasty side of the job. Fuckers like Polliver are where the big money is at, and it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it. It helps the both of them out-- Arya gets practice and a cut of the profit, and Sandor has his little bait dog to lull his marks into a false sense of security. Besides, jobs like this are always easier with partners. The Hound is rough around the edges, and honestly rough in the middle too, but Arya owes him a lot.

When they get to the station, they leave Nymeria in the car with the AC on and the engine running. “Is that a good idea?” Arya asks, eyebrow raised, and Sandor snorts at her as he pushes Polliver in front of him.

“We’re in front of the bloody police station, you stupid little runt. Who the fuck is going to steal a car in front of the police station?”

Arya concedes the point with a shrug. As they’re approaching the entrance, though, the double doors slam open, and out marches Detective Brienne Tarth, looking absolutely  _ furious _ , her face red as a tomato beneath her freckles.

Brienne is tall and ungainly and even more awkward looking than Arya is, which is a feat in and of itself, and she  _ always _ dresses in uniform even though she could go plainclothes. Arya thinks she’s a little ridiculous, and also sort of wants to be her someday. Now, though, Tarth is on the warpath, and she stomps past the two of them without so much as a glance. Arya and Sandor exchange looks.

When they’ve manhandled Polliver inside, the station is in its usual state of controlled chaos, with phones ringing and uniformed officers milling about as well as various civilians waiting for various things with varying degrees of patience. When she was a kid, Arya would sometimes go to visit her father while he was at work; Winterfell’s police station seemed as quiet and subdued as a cemetary in comparison to the KLPD.  _ A fucking awful city filled with fucking awful people _ , Sandor had told her once.  _ And sometimes we get to punch some of them, heh heh. _

In the center of everything is Edric Dayne, the administrative assistant, looking harried as usual as he fields phone calls. When he sees the two of them with Polliver he waves them over, pulling the phone he’s speaking into away from his lips. “Receiving?” he asks, and at Sandor’s nod he gestures at them to continue further into the station. Arya and Sandor share another meaningful glance, and by unspoken agreement Arya hangs back in the lobby as he marches Polliver deeper into the bowels of the building.

“You’d better put my name on the receipt too!” Arya calls after him, and Sandor gives her the finger over his shoulder. As he goes through the door leading him further in, Jaime Lannister brushes past him at a jog, looking nearly as angry as Brienne had. Jaime spares Arya a nod before heading out the front entrance. Jaime’s cool, when he’s not being a prick. Sandor used to work with him and the other detectives, and sometimes Arya tags along when they all go out for drinks together. Sandor’s old coworkers mostly just saw her as an indulgence at first, the Hound’s little pet project, and didn’t treat her very seriously until Hyle Hunt made a pass at her after a couple tequila shots and she punched his nards. Brienne had given her a high five. It’d rocked.

Arya waits for Ned to get off the phone and sidles closer to his desk. He looks up from his computer and gives her a tired smile. “Hey, Arya,” he says, as usual, brushing some of his blond hair out of his eyes.

“Hi Ned.” She leans against the side the desk and asks sympathetically, “Rough morning?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” he groans, running his hand through his hair again, the way he does when he’s stressed out. “This place has gone to the dogs. Another homicide last night, Brienne got pulled off the Hoat case, Watty discharged his firearm on accident, and Ramsay is having way too much fun with severed feet in the morgue. I’ve got so much paperwork that I’m practically shitting it.”

Arya winces sympathetically. “How many people do you think Ramsay would have killed by now if he didn’t get to legally play with dead bodies every day?”

“I don’t know,” Ned says, looking haunted, “I don’t know, I don’t want to know, and I don’t want to think about it. He’s a sociopath. Last week I said hi to him as we were clocking in together and he  _ hissed _ at me. Why he’s even here I have no idea.”

“Nepotism,” Arya says sagely, no stranger to it herself given her parents. “Why’d Brienne get pulled though?” That would certainly explain her anger. Arya knows she and Jaime have been on the Hoat case for well over a year now.

Vargo Hoat is a frequent flyer in the KLPD, and one of Baelish’s favorite clients. He’s been charged with kidnapping, murder, extortion, sex trafficking… if there’s a crime, Hoat’s been accused of it at some point. Somehow, though, the charges never manage to stick in court. He has an alibi, or witnesses against him change their stories too much to be reliable, or evidence is too circumstantial. Jaime treats the whole ordeal with his typical sardonic attitude, but any time Brienne talks about it over drinks (never details of the case, because she’s too professional, just her irritation with it) she gets worked up enough to start pulling her hair out over it.

Ned gives her a wry look. “I know what you’re doing, Arya Stark. Trying to weasel information out of me. Even if I knew why I couldn’t tell you, and you know it.” She shrugs at him good-naturedly, denying nothing, and then the phone rings again and Ned tilts his head back to sigh at the ceiling. “I love my job,” he tells it dully. “I love my job. I love my job.” Then he takes a deep breath and answers the call.

Arya loiters for a couple minutes, waiting, before growing bored. She waves at Ned, who gives a tired wave back, then heads out of the station and back to Sandor’s car. Nymeria wiggles excitedly when she slides back into the passenger seat, and Arya turns and gives her chin a good scratch. “Stinky puppy,” she coos teasingly. “Stinky stinky stinky puppy.”

Out of the corner of her eye she sees a head of blonde hair, and she leans to look out the window. Brienne and Jaime are standing against the side wall of the station where the officers take their smoke breaks, Brienne looking agitated and Jaime, a cigarette in his hand, seeming to try to placate her. Brienne gesticulates widely, crooked teeth bared in a snarl, not helping her already ugly appearance, and Jaime just nods and takes another pull from his cigarette, blowing the smoke to the side. Arya rolls the car window down, but even as angry as Brienne is she’s not shouting and Arya can’t hear their conversation. Still, she watches curiously until Sandor jerks the driver’s side door open and flops into his seat.

“Brienne got pulled off the Hoat case,” Arya says by way of greeting, and Sandor nods with a grunt.

“Yup.”

“Ned wouldn’t tell me why, though.”

Sandor pulls out of the parking lot and back onto the highway, in the direction of High Hill and Tyrion Lannister’s bond agency. He grunts again. “Heard a bit about it while I was in there. Something about outstanding warrants in Qohor. They want him extradited back to bloody Essos but they gotta clear current Westerosi warrants first, and they’re not happy with how KLPD keeps mucking up. Think it’s our fault nothing against him sticks, so Interpol sent over a couple Faceless fucks from Braavos. Varys is having kittens over it, the fat bald powdered cunt, heh. Bad publicity for the force if some jumped-up peacocking bastard greasy spaghetti slurpers get him with something we couldn’t.”

Arya turns to stare at him, mouth agape with surprise. “Faceless Men? In King’s Landing?” The surprise turns into delight. “Are they at the station now? Can we meet them?”

He gives her a disgusted look. “Don’t soak your fucking panties in my car. Yes, they’re here, and no, we’re not going to meet them. You and I don’t have shit to do with Hoat and I plan to bloody keep it that way.”

“Gendry’s going to bust a nut when I tell him,” she laughs, “he loves those stupid video games.”

Apparently, if urban legends are to be believed, the Faceless Men of Braavos are secretly a league of assassins who are able to change their appearance using blood magic. There are stories abound of old timey kings from a bajillion years ago hiring them to kill someone. Nowadays they’re mostly just a favorite plot device in soap operas and crime dramas and secret agent movies, and more recently popularized by a video game series centered around them. Assassin’s Creed is okay, Arya thinks, if a little trite. Typically, if there’s some sort of consumer media with a concept based in politics and a plot hole that needs filling, Faceless Men Did It is the trope of choice, a veritable modern day Dues Ex Machina.

The reality of the Faceless Men, though, is that they do basically the same thing Brienne and Jaime themselves do, except internationally and with better funding and a little less red tape. Government agents are still government agents, even if they’re called something fancy when they do it.

“Sucks for Brienne, though,” Arya says after a moment. “This was supposed to be her big break.”

Sandor grunts. “Lannister will keep her updated. He’s still department lead, the Braavosi will have to work with him. He can tell her all about it when they’re done fucking and he’s wiping the cum off her thighs.”

“Gross.” Arya grimaces and slides her sunglasses back on. Then, “Do you think they talk about crime scenes during foreplay?”

“Heh. Bet he reads her the department rules and regulations. That’s probably pillowtalk to Tarth.”

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can be held against you.” The both of them let out mean little snorts of laughter. Sandor takes a turn she’s not familiar with and she glances at him in confusion. “Where are we going?”

“McDonalds. I’m fucking hungry.”

 

* * *

 

It’s raining by the time Arya gets back home that afternoon, one of the surprise spring showers that the South is famous for and that Arya had had to grow accustomed to when she first came to King’s Landing. Whenever it rains the city smells like wet concrete and shit; she used to hate it, but now she barely notices. Sandor kicks them out of his car, reminding Arya of their plans to grab drinks with some of the force in a few days. As soon as the door is shut behind her, he turns on his angry screaming North-of-the-Wall music and she can hear it thudding as he drives away. Nymeria, who would normally want to go for a run but who also  _ detests _ rain, bolts straight for the front door and huddles against it, shivering even though she’s just barely damp and looking far more pitiful than the light drizzle warrants.

Once the door is open Nymeria bounds into the house, shaking and rubbing herself along the furniture and the walls, and then disappears from sight as Arya sheds her light jacket and takes off her boots in the entryway. She hears the pitter patter of nails against the hardwood floor, and then quietly, as if from a distance even though it’s only a room over, Gendry saying, “Wet dog! Hello, wet dog.”

She follows the sound of his voice to his room and knocks lightly on the doorframe; he glances at her over his shoulder and dips his chin at her in acknowledgement. One hand is rubbing Nymeria briskly behind the ears as the pup’s tongue lolls out and the other holds a pencil poised above the mostly-blank canvas. “How’s it going, Bob Ross?” Arya asks, and he rolls his eyes.

When their friendship had still been on-again-off-again in her late teens, she’d been surprised to learn that Gendry was an  _ artist _ , of all things; but probably less surprised than Gendry himself had been. Technically speaking, he’s a graphic design artist, the catch-all degree of the artistically inclined who aren’t good enough at any one thing to make significant money off of it, and most of his commission work is in web design, but paint is his preferred medium and he’s even participated in some of the artsy fartsy gallery events that pop up in King’s Landing sometimes, the ones where local artists set up their own tiny exhibits. The rich of the city eat that shit up and pretend they’re  _ supporting the community _ by buying artwork to stick on the walls of their dentists’ offices or law practices while kids in the slums of Flea Bottom still dig for new shoes and clothes out of dumpsters. He still works at the same garage he's always worked at, though, the one he's been an employee of since before he got his GED. Arya thinks it's far more likely that he'll just end up running Mott's business one day than actually pursuing a full career in art. She doesn't tell him that, though. He gets defensive.

“Did you get your guy?” he asks, turning back to his easel. Right now he’s working on a nude figure, sketching lines and shapes lightly with a soft grade graphite pencil, his grayscale reference picture taped to the top right of the canvas frame. The figure is angled at profile and has her head turned away from the camera, dark hair obscuring her face, bent backwards lightly at the waist. Her arms are thrown up over her head and her hands are intertwined, fingers curled around each other just slightly and everything lower than her rib cage out of the shot. The hands will be the part he focuses on, Arya knows; he’ll gloss over the collarbones and the shoulders and the pert naked breasts to render the knuckles and fingertips and wrists with painstaking delicacy. He likes drawing hands and feet in intricate enough detail that she used to wonder if he had a fetish for them, but he says he just likes the way they look and they're fun to paint, and he’s never asked her to touch his cock with her foot, so. The reference pictures looks slightly familiar in a way she can’t place. Probably a stock photo of some sort, she figures, some generic tasteful titty pic. They all look the same to her-- she's dated girls and slept with a couple and still doesn't understand the fascination with tits.

“No,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning against the doorframe. “He killed me, actually. I’m dead now. Sorry.”

“Aw, nuts. I’ll have to find a new roommate.”

“Good luck finding someone as awesome as me!” Arya calls over her shoulder, leaving his bedroom in favor of the kitchen. She doesn’t share Sandor’s obsession with fried foods, nor his budget for them, so she’d mostly just watched sullenly while he’d gnawed his way through another two hamburgers and a large order of fries. Nymeria follows her after a few minutes and watches her poke around the kitchen, eyes wide and attentively waiting for her to drop something. She heats up the last of the leftover Braavosi they’d gotten on her first night back from the Wall a few days ago. The scent of the spice reminds her of what  _ else _ they did that night, but it’s been a long time since she let herself feel guilty over the shit she and Gendry do to each other. In terms of the pain they’ve mutually caused, the tally between them has always been pretty close.

The food also reminds her of what she’s learned today, and she wanders back to Gendry’s room with the food, Nymeria on her heels and sniffing eagerly. She flops across his bed and digs into her meal with her fingers messily, hissing when the hot tomato sauce burns her skin. “There’s a couple Faceless Men at the KLPD,” she tells him, mouth full of flaky fish. He turns to stare at her, eye blue eyes wide.

“What? You’re fucking with me. No way.” She grins, and after a second he grins back. He turns on his stool to face her fully, tucking his pencil behind his ear thoughtlessly and elbows resting on his knees. “Holy shit! Did you get to meet them?”

She shakes her head and then shrugs at his groan of disappointment. “I mean, I might have,” she amends after a second, “if they actually  _ can _ change faces and one of them was pretending to be Sandor or Ned.”

Gendry’s face tightens for a brief moment at the mention of Ned, who he’s never liked based on the sole reason that  _ Arya _ likes him, so as she can tell. She rolls her eyes at him, tempted to flick a slice of tomato at him but unwilling to deal with the ire she’ll bring on herself if she misses and hits his canvas instead. “Stop that,” she chastises, “Ned is a cool guy. You’d like him if you ever bothered to talk to him when he comes to hang out.” He grumbles under his breath, and Arya pretends not to hear it. “ _ Anyway _ , there’s this nasty motherfucker named Hoat that they’re after, apparently. Maybe if they can manage to nail him with something I’ll get to meet them.”

“Hoat,” Gendry says thoughtfully, looking troubled. “That name sounds familiar.”

Arya grabs a mushroom between her fingers and swirls it in the tomato sauce, then pops it in her mouth. “He’s been in and out of the news. Vargo Hoat. KLPD can’t get anything to stick on him, but apparently he’s got this thing for chopping off hands and feet.” At Gendry’s horrified look, she shrugs. “Could be hearsay,” she says, going back to her food. “Jaime just says they find feet a lot. Our coroner, Ramsay, has a field day every time Hoat pops back out from whatever rock he crawls under when he’s not cutting people up. Jaime says he plays  _ It’s Raining Men _ on the speakers in the morgue.”

“Hell, Arya,” Gendry says, and when she looks up at him he’s still staring at her, aghast. “And you  _ work _ with people like that?”

She shrugs again. “Sort of? Adjacently. Not  _ with _ .” She pauses, then smirks. “I bet I could get Ramsay to get me a foot for you. Let you have a live model. Or, well. I guess not really  _ live _ .”

Gendry looks back at his canvas, the light sketches of the nude figure, and shudders violently. “That’s gross, Arya,” he tells her reproachfully. “You’re weird and gross.” It comes out less teasing than he probably meant for it to, and the set of his shoulders is tense. She has a feeling she knows what he’s about to say before he even says it, but even though she’s braced for it she still can’t help the spike of irritation when he grumbles, “I wish you’d get a different job. One where I didn’t have to worry about you chasing down crazy people and getting yourself hurt.”

“I can take care of myself, Gendry,” she says, a warning in her voice. They have this conversation, this  _ argument _ , a lot. Pretty much every time she goes to pick up a skip with Sandor, one that actually matters and pays worth a damn. Sometimes he ignores the warning, sometimes he doesn’t. From the way he turns back to glare at her, his jaw set, she has a feeling it’s going to be one of  _ those _ days.

So it surprises her when instead, Gendry stares at her hard for several long seconds before taking a deep breath and then letting it out with a sigh, visibly deflating. “I know,” he says after a moment. “Yeah, I know. You always have.” He turns back to his canvas and takes the pencil out from behind his ear, going back to work quietly.

He says it with such strange melancholy, such resignation, that it leaves her feeling weirdly unbalanced. One thing she’s always been able to count on Gendry for is an argument; they’re both good at fighting each other. It's predictable and even fun sometimes, to rile him up. It’s off-putting for him to concede so easily. Arya hesitates, fidgeting on his bed with her empty takeout container, feeling like she’s waiting for him to pick the gauntlet back up and fight her about it like she’d expected him to. After just watching him work in silence for a few minutes, she gets up and leaves, feeling unbalanced, like she’d lost the argument they didn’t even have.

Gendry finally comes out of his room a few hours later. The spring drizzle has turned into a hearty downpour, and Arya is curled up on the couch with Nymeria, watching something on the television without really paying attention to what’s going on or even what it is. Gendry stands in front of the couch, hands tucked in the pockets of his sweatpants, and waits. He’s changed out of the clothes he’d been working in. Arya blinks up at him, and then gently pushes Nymeria to the far end of the couch and shuffles so Gendry can sit, and once he does she puts on the next episode of The Great Westerosi Bake Off, and a truce is wordlessly reached between them. Nymeria grumbles quietly when she’s moved, and with the three of them on the couch it’s a tight fit, with Arya tucked up against Gendry’s side and Nymeria’s head sprawled across both their feet.

As they watch contestants triumph and falter in turns, Gendry’s arm migrates from the back of the couch to around her shoulder, and eventually his hand drops down into her hair and he scratches his nails against her scalp. It’s a dirty move, one that he employed liberally while they were dating, and Arya hums and closes her eyes, leaning further into him. He smells like chalk and graphite, and she wonders how far into sketching the figure he’d gotten.

She’s not sure when she dozes off, but when she wakes Nymeria is gone and she and Gendry are stretched out, her flat against him fully, cheek pressed against his chest. She makes a soft, sleepy noise of confusion and blinks up at his face. He’s still watching the TV, volume lower than she remembers it being, but his expression is troubled. Outside, the rain keeps pouring.

“I just worry about you,” he says suddenly, his voice quiet. It surprises her enough that she has to think for a moment to remember what he’s talking about, and with her sleep-addled mind she can’t immediately get defensive, and he keeps going before she can say anything. “Maybe I shouldn’t. But I do. Because I care about you, stupid.”

“You’re stupid,” she mumbles reflexively, awake enough for that at least. “You’re stupider. The stupidest there is.”

He tugs her closer, until her head is tucked under his chin. He lowers his face into her hair, maybe just breathing, maybe to kiss the top of her head, and she thinks briefly to struggle, but she’s warm, and he’s solid underneath her, and for once she’s not trying to think three steps ahead to predict when he’ll leave her again. “I know,” he says, his voice sad. “I really am. The stupidest there is.”

 

* * *

 

The thing they don’t talk about is how after everything, after all of their individual faults and issues, her job had been the breaking point in their relationship.

She’d come home from a contract with Sandor with a paycheck, a black eye, a busted lip, stitches in her scalp and a sense of accomplishment and elation; and Gendry had lost his goddamn  _ mind _ .

“You could have gotten  _ seriously hurt _ , Arya!” he’d screamed at her.

“I'm not going to get hurt, I'm  _ careful _ ,” she’d said petulantly. He’d gestured, wordless with anger, to her face, and she’d snorted out a breath. “This is nothing,” she’d said, and he’d  _ raged _ , and Gendry had always raged with the best of them.

He’d called her stupid and reckless; she’d called him overbearing. He’d told her she was irresponsible; she’d said that at least one of them had to make money. He’d shouted and roared and thrown things, and she’d railed and shrieked and thrown back. It was the only time Nymeria had ever actually hidden from them because of an argument.

Arya had tossed up her hands and said she wasn’t talking about this anymore. “At least I try to work through my problems like an  _ adult _ ,” he’d hissed; “Oh right, like when I was fifteen and you  _ fucked _ me and then  _ threw me out?” _ she’d laughed.

He’d punched a hole in the wall. “Very healthy,” she’d crowed, “very  _ adult! _ ”

She’d thought he was going to hit her. She’d thought he’d give her another black eye to match the first. He'd looked like he'd wanted to, jaw tight and fists clenched and shoulders high. She'd thought he was going to hit her, and part of her even welcomed it. Instead, he’d simply left, and she didn’t see him for a few days, and she didn’t cry herself to sleep that night, she  _ didn’t _ , but seven hells was it a very near thing. He came back, eventually, but after that things weren't the same. For the next week Nymeria stuck close to the walls with her head down and her ears back, and she flinched and ran every time either of them spoke, which didn’t happen often.

In the end, he was tired of worrying about losing her, and she was tired of wondering when he’d decide to leave and not come back this time.

They were very, very good at hurting each other.

 

 

* * *

 

**FROM [Shireen]** :  _ So have you talked to him recently? _

**TO [Shireen]** :  _ Not in a couple days. Its not like we made actual plans to keep in contact or anythign. We just text occasionally _

**TO [Shireen]** :  _ **anything _

**TO [Shireen]** :  _ He’s probs still writing in maidenpool about… idk what he would even write about. Ancient targaryen sex operas maybe _

**FROM [Shireen]** :  _ That’s an interesting and very specific pull. Why Targaryen sex operas? _

**TO [Shireen]** :  _ That tongue bruh _

**FROM [Shireen]** :  _ Jeez. That good? _

**FROM [Sandor]** :  _ drinks 2nite ur picking up my tab _

**TO [Sandor]** :  _ Babe I came so hard my soul left my body and went and highfived the maiden and she was like “damn arya that was tight now go back and get that dick” _

**TO [Sandor]** :  _ Pay for your own drinks you ugly piece of shit _

**TO [Sandor]** :  _ Oh fuck OOPS _

**TO [Shireen]** :  _ WRONG PERSON WRONG PERSON I TEXTED SANDOR GROSS SHIT _

**FROM [Shireen]** :  _?? _

**TO [Shireen]** :  _ FUCK _

**TO [Sandor]** : _ That was inappropriate and I apologize. _

**FROM [Sandor]** :  _ ur fired _

**TO [Sandor]** :  _I don't even work for you?_

**FROM [Sandor]**  :  _ur still fired_

**TO [Sandor]** : _You know what?_ _ Yeah. That’s fair. _

 

* * *

 

Sandor and Arya have trouble making eye contact that night and it’s Arya’s fault, so she does actually buy his first couple drinks. Lem comments on it curiously, but then Arya punches him hard in the arm and everyone drops it.

The Crossroads is the bar of choice for most of the officers on the KLPD force, and Sandor still gets regular invites from the detectives that used to be his coworkers; Arya, therefore, gets invited as well by proxy. There’s a rotating group of faces, and rare are the nights when everyone can get together in one group, but more often than not there are regulars who Arya is comfortable enough to speak to. Jaime and Brienne, of course, are there nearly every week, and rarely does one come without the other. Beric often joins them to share tales of the glory days with Sandor, and sometimes Thoros comes as well but apparently not as much as he used to due to a recent liver problem. Lem, Tom, and Anguy in forensics make frequent appearances. Huntsman the canine officer, who Arya would really like to like but who is a little too unpredictable for her tastes. Asha isn’t part of the KLPD but she comes out for drinks whenever she’s in town, and that’s always a  _ party _ . Hell, sometimes even Ramsay crawls up out of the morgue to go out with them, but whenever he does he just stares at them all with his weird colorless eyes and drinks Bloody Mary’s and doesn’t speak if he doesn’t have to.

Arya’s brought Gendry a couple times, and he seems to get along with Lem and Anguy well enough (which is surprising, because Lem doesn’t really get along with anyone), but for the most part when she comes it’s just her and Sandor, and she watches and listens and learns from people that have been doing jobs  _ adjacent _ to hers for longer than she’s been alive.

Ned’s come along tonight, so considering her embarrassing mishap with the Hound, who can insult her and make jokes at her expense all he wants but who still does truthfully see her as something of a protege and therefore probably doesn’t want to know the details of when she pulls, Arya attaches herself to him and the two of them match each other shot for shot for a bit before settling into their usual game while everyone else in their weird social group breaks up into their own cliques. The Crossroads has, if nothing else, gained a reputation for being on the straight and narrow, if only because of the regular presence of a bevy of cops; often times on nights when the force descends on the bar, other patrons take their patronage elsewhere, leaving the KLPD the run of the place to the mixed irritation and appreciation of Jeyne Heddle, the owner.

“Never have I ever… hmm. Never have I ever… gone skinny dipping?” Ned tries, and Arya sends him a look and shakes her head. “Damn, I thought I’d have you on that one,” he says with a grumble and she smirks.

“Never have I ever had a traffic violation,” she replies after a moment of thinking, and Ned groans loudly enough that Tom and Anguy glance over to their table with knowing grins.

“Not fair!” he cries, his purple eyes already slightly hazy with drink. “You don’t even have a driver’s license!”

“Have you had a traffic violation?” Arya asks, propping her chin up in her hand, and Ned groans again. She smirks wider. “Then drink up!” He does, glaring at her all the while.

“Never have I ever…” He trails off again briefly, leaning back in his chair to look up at the ceiling, before deciding on, “...had a one night stand?”

This time Arya groans and Ned laughs. “Slut!” Anguy jeers from the next table over as Arya throws back her shot, and then hisses “ _ Shit! _ ” when she flings her empty glass at him.

“None of that, now,” Brienne calls sternly from across the room while Jeyne Heddle at the bar shouts, “ _ Oy! _ If that breaks you’re paying for it!” Everyone else just laughs as Anguy rubs at his shoulder, his glare softened by the smirk on his face. Still, the loss of the glass calls for an end in the game, and Ned concedes to her victory as gracefully as he always does, with a shrug and a chuckle. He buys them both a couple beers to replace the shots and Arya tries not to think about the headache she's sure to have in the morning. Whatever. It's not like she works a regular day job the way he does, and Gendry can feed Nymeria and take her out for walkie so Arya can sleep in.

He’s a good egg, is Ned. Arya doesn’t really get why Gendry dislikes him so much.

There’s a chorus of groans when Tom gets up and swaggers his way to the jukebox, and behind the bar Jeyne visibly grimaces and moves into a back room. A few seconds later the Southron butt rock that’d been playing at a reasonable volume quiets just in time for the first chords of that truly horrendous cover of  _ The Bear and the Maiden Fair _ with the electric guitar to begin playing through the speakers as Tom cues up his customary list of old power ballads. "They're classics!" he chuckles when Lem boos him. In an effort to distract themselves from the noise, Sandor, Beric, Brienne and Jaime all congregate at one table, and after a moment of unspoken deliberation Arya and Ned join them.

“Why the fuck do you still invite him?” Sandor asks Beric with a growl, to which Anguy shouts from across the room, “Why the fuck do we still invite  _ you? _ ” before Lem punches him in the same arm Arya’s glass had hit him in and he yelps. Jeyne makes a wordless noise of reproach and glares at the boys until they resettle.

“He’s been around a while,” Beric says, sighing, and Jaime smirks into his IPA. Then Beric turns to Jaime and Brienne and asks, voice filled with curiosity, “So what’s it like working with Faceless Men? I’ve never had the pleasure myself, but I’ve heard stories.” Arya, eager to get dirt for Gendry to get back in his good graces, perks up.

Jaime grimaces and Brienne looks like she’s sucked on a lemon, twisting her already unfortunate face into an even more unfortunate expression. “We shouldn’t talk about the Hoat case,” she says tightly and with a pointed look at Ned, who holds his hands up defensively, and Arya, who’s leaning forward with visible interest.

“I’m not asking about Hoat,” Beric points out mildly, raising the one eyebrow that’s not obscured by his eyepatch. Arya isn’t entirely sure why he has an eyepatch, but she does know that he’s been shot about a dozen times and has had more concussions than she’d previously known to be possible for one person to have and still be functional. “I’m asking about our friends from Braavos.”

Brienne continues to look constipated while Jaime heaves a heavy sigh. “They’re fair enough, I suppose,” he says, contemplating the neck of his beer bottle. “Very no-nonsense. No sense of humor to either of them. The lady, she’s  _ tiny _ , smaller than you,” and here he gestures at Arya, “and she doesn’t speak a lick of Common, which is  _ astonishing _ , considering her profession. Every time I try to talk to her she just  _ stares _ at me. The guy is always smiling, but never at anything in particular, and he talks like an idiot.  _ A man _ this and  _ a man _ that.  _ This man _ ,  _ that man _ . Man, man, man.”

“He must be from Lorath,” Arya announces suddenly, and then draws herself up when the others at the table look at her with surprised scrutiny. “I met a guy from Lorath once,” she explains with a shrug. “It's like a politeness thing. Deprecation of self, or something. It’s, like, vulgar to them to refer to people directly ‘cause it implies intimacy. He’s probably trying to be respectful.” (She may have done some Googling about it, once she'd gotten home.)

“Whatever it is, it's  _ annoying _ ,” Jaime insists, gesturing with his beer bottle. “Trying to understand conversations with him is like reaching around my ass to scratch my elbow. He calls himself  _ a man _ , he calls me  _ a man _ \--”

“He called  _ me _ a man,” Brienne cuts in, eyebrows drawn in, which explains another reason for her anger with the situation beyond getting pulled off the case.

“Can you blame him?” Sandor grunts, and Brienne gives him an absolutely murderous glare.

“Well, he apologized for that afterwards, to his credit,” Jaime says, reaching out to pat Brienne's arm. She goes back to her own beer, slightly mollified. “Plus,” he says with gravity, like he’s about to make some damning judgement, “he’s a  _ ginger _ .” 

Sandor nods solemnly, and Beric looks between the two of them, insulted. “What’s wrong with gingers?”

Jaime lets out a laugh and drains the last of his beer. “All in all, though, I don't understand the infamy,” he continues with a shrug once he’s done. “Up to this point they've mostly just read and reread the case files and mumbled to themselves in Braavosi.”

Arya opens her mouth to spew out a litany of questions (Have they been to the firing range yet? What are their scores? Do they have badges? Are they hot? Can they actually change faces like in Assassin's Creed? Would they be willing to autograph something?) but anything she might ask is drowned out by the chorus of boos as Tom jumps up onto one of the bar tables and starts belting out the lyrics to  _ Two Hearts That Beat as One _ . Lem and Anguy start throwing beer nuts at him, and Beric heaves a sigh when he wobbles dangerously.

“Someone will be taking him to a hospital tonight,” Beric says wearily.

“Nose goes?” Sandor suggests, and this must be a ritual that occurs frequently that Arya isn't privy to, because everyone at the table but her, even Brienne and Ned, puts a finger at the tip of their nose quick as a flash. They all turn to look at her expectantly.

“I don't fucking work for you,” she says dryly, and then swipes Ned's beer, and behind her Tom warbles the last line of the song and then topples right off the table.

 

* * *

 

Gendry’s playing Red Dead Redemption, leaning forward with his tongue poking out in concentration, and Arya’s laying against the other end of the couch with her legs stretched out and her feet kicked up in his lap playing a game on her phone and trying not to focus on her raging hangover when she gets a text with an image attachment.

**FROM [A Man]** :  _ A man has picked up a new book. Does Arya Stark enjoy poetry? He found a passage that reminded him of her. _

The picture message is of a page in a book, zoomed in so that only a single paragraph shows; it’s underlined with a yellow highlighter and Arya wonders for a brief, giddy moment if Jaqen did that himself before shaking her head. He doesn’t seem the type to write in books, even if he liked them. The paragraph says:

_ Joyful, joyful, joyful, _

_ as only dogs know how to be happy _

_ with only the autonomy _

_ of their shameless spirit. _

Arya bites her lip against a smile. A cursory Google search brings up the entirety of the poem, and she laughs as she reads it.

**TO [A Man]** :  _ Jaqen thats a poem about a dog dying _

**FROM [A Man]** :  _ :T _

**FROM [A Man]** :  _ Yes but that specific part of the poem was about a dog being alive. Joyfully so. _

Arya grins and calls out, “Nymeria! To me!” Out of the corner of her eye she sees Gendry glance at her for a moment, and she waves him away as Nymeria’s appearance is heralded by the clicking of nails and she comes around the couch and sticks her nose in Arya’s face, sniffing curiously, her tail wagging behind her. Arya opens the camera app on her phone and snaps a picture of Nymeria, so close that only her superimposed golden eyes and her dark ears are in frame, and between her ears the blur of her tail in the background. She sends it to Jaqen, chewing on a smile.

“What’s up?” Gendry asks, eyes still on the television.

Arya hesitates. She’d told Gendry about Jaqen, after their tempers had cooled, after he’d taken his anger and hurt out on her body. (It sounds  _ awful _ when she thinks of it like that-- sex has always been used as something of a punishment between the two of them, so long as they’ve been having sex, even when they were together and happy. It’s easier to fuck, sometimes, when neither of them want to talk about their hurts.) They’d gotten over it. She thinks.

“Jaqen,” she finally answers him truthfully. “Talking about dogs.” Gendry is quiet.

“Okay,” he says after a moment. She watches him carefully to see if he’s trying to hide his real thoughts from her, but when he looks back at her a few seconds later and she catches his eye he gives her a small, if slightly strained, smile.

She smiles back, then nudges his arm with her foot. “Your horse just ran off a cliff,” she tells him sweetly, and he jumps with a swear and turns back to his game. Nymeria loses interest in them and goes to sit in front of the window, watching cars go by outside with her tail sweeping the floor and sending dust motes and dog hair up into the air, visible in the sunlight. Arya’s phone buzzes again.

**FROM [A Man]** :  _ Joyful, joyful, joyful. _

She smiles harder and closes her eyes, listening to Gendry grumble in the background, her heart feeling light.

 

* * *

 

If Vargo Hoat is a frequent flyer of Baelish’s, then Lommy Greenhands belongs in Tyrion 

Lannister’s mile-high club. He was one of Arya’s first skip jobs when she started two years ago and  _ still _ hasn’t been formally charged with the crime he’d been arrested for: possessing, cultivating, and distributing marijuana. His court date keeps getting continuances since a law was passed making pot a legal substance literally two hours before he was arrested and hadn’t officially been made public knowledge yet, and the kinks on how that’s to be handled are still being worked out by the Powers That Be. Regardless, two years ago he’d posted bail and since he’s been neither charged nor acquitted he’s still technically a client of Lannister.

He’s also an  _ idiot _ and has missed all but three of his scheduled pretrial check-ins over the last two years. He’s a fucking dead end that Arya  _ still _ hasn’t collected a body receipt for, but once a month she hikes to his apartment to remind him of his court date, and then a week later she hikes back to frogmarch him to the station to reschedule it when he inevitably forgets. She’d just let him fucking rot because that’s about all he’s worth, just  _ rot _ , but somehow she’d ended up introducing him to Hot Pie and now they’re dating because Hot Pie is apparently  _ also an idiot _ , so she feels something of a responsibility to keep him from being arrested again. Mostly because she doesn’t want to hear about the conjugal visits that Hot Pie would inevitably share with her on their biweekly lunch date.

She’d called him up while at the Wall since she’d been there at the time leading up to his next check-in, but reception had been spotty (“--remember,  _ three days _ , Lommy.” “ _ What? _ ” “ _ Court. Three. Days. _ Be there, or I swear to the gods--” “ _ WHAT? _ ”) and experience with him has suggested that he wouldn’t have listened even if she’d been there to box his ears in person like she normally is. So now, nearly two weeks after coming back to King’s Landing, Arya sits on a crowded bus riding up to the Street of the Sister, half-asleep with a to-go mug of coffee and trying to mentally prepare herself for the shitfit Lommy will surely throw when she wakes him up to drag him to the station. No Nymeria today; he’s allergic to the fur. It’s barely past five in the morning and Arya wishes she were  _ dead _ , but she wants him there bright and early to handle this before it becomes more of an issue than it already is.

“I should just let him miss it entirely,” she tells herself grumpily, eyes closed as she mumbles into the lip of her mug. “Then they could charge him for something else and I could beat him up and actually get  _ paid _ for dragging him in.” But then she thinks of Hot Pie’s big brown eyes filling with tears and his multiple chins wobbling sadly and lets out a grunt of self-disgust.  _ Friendship _ . Ugh.

Lommy lives in a high rise condo on the uptown side of the Sister, closer to the Dragonpit than Flea Bottom, bought and paid for by his green, green hands. After the legalization of marijuana he’d applied for a license, and capitalized on the growing demand. Now Lommy legally grows and sells both street- and medicinal-grade, and makes cash hand over fist selling to plebeians and medical suppliers alike. An entire half of his condo has been converted into growing rooms, and every time Arya visits it’s like she’s stepped into the inside of a bong. She’d accuse HP of gold digging, but he and Lommy got together when Lom was still growing plants in empty milk jugs out of his closet.

Lommy’s building is fancy enough that as a non-resident she has to be buzzed up to his floor. After the long bus ride her coffee has gone cold, but she keeps sipping at it irritably. When she finally arrives at his door she pounds on it, and it takes nearly a minute for him to answer even though he’d had to give her permission to come up. 

“Open the fucking door, Lommy,” she shouts when she hears shuffling on the other side stop and start several times. After a moment the lock on the door unlatches with a click and it opens a crack, and Lommy’s bloodshot eyes squint at her. A veritable wave of odor comes through the tiny space between the door and the doorframe. No wonder his eyes are red.

“Do you have a warrant?”

Arya rolls her own eyes and takes another sip of her coffee. “I’m not a cop, Lommy. I don’t need a warrant to come in.” It’s a familiar song and dance. Lommy asks her this every time. She genuinely isn’t sure if he does it to mess with her, or if he’s actually so stupid that he legitimately forgets from one visit to the next. “Can I come in or not? I’m almost out of coffee.” She raises her to-go mug and shakes it at him, the last mouthful of liquid audibly splashing around the inside. It’s a mug from Hot Pie’s bakery, chosen specifically for the purpose of making Lommy feel bad and be nicer to her. There’s not much love lost between the two of them.

Lommy glares at her from heavily-lidded eyes, but eventually backs up and opens the door. “You can’t go poking around without a warrant,” he warns accusingly; Arya ignores him and brushes past on the way to his kitchen, having been here enough times to know the layout of his condo.

“Not a cop,” she singsongs over her shoulder. Lommy’s gotten one of those fancy coffee presses and an espresso machine since she was here last, and when she sees it she lets out a noise of delight. “ Nice! Do you mind measuring out for me? Also, you know you missed your check-in, right?”

He grunts and starts setting up the press, putting a pot of water on to boil. “I thought it was in two days.” Arya opens his fridge, ignoring his sound of irritation, and hums happily when she finds a box of crullers from HP’s. “Hey, those are mine! That’s theft, that is. Barge into my home to arrest me and eat the food my boyfriend made me and drink my coffee.” She takes the box and hops up onto the marble counter to watch him grind coffee beans. “You’re a piece of work, Arya Stark,” he says, measuring carefully with practiced eyes. “A real crooked pig.”

“Cops don’t like it when you call them pigs,” she tells him, mouth full of cruller. Some of the glazed sugar crumbles off and lands on her lap, and he lets out another sound of wordless indignation when she brushes it to the floor. “And your check-in was last week.”

“Oh. Pie and I were visiting his mom in the Bottom.”

She sends him a Look. “Flea Bottom is fifteen minutes away, Lom. Don’t be a tit about this. You  _ know _ you have to go to the check-ins.”

“I can’t drive,” he says. He takes the pot off the stove and adds the boiling water to the press. “I got a doctor’s note and everything. Astigmatism. Not allowed.”

That’s a new excuse, and she mentally files it away with all the others to tell Gendry about and laugh over later. “There’s this thing, a lovely invention really, called a  _ bus _ . People drive them all day and you can just hop on them and go places. I do it all the time.”

“I weren’t doing nothing illegal,” Lommy tries again with a different tact. “I don’t see why you cops keep riding my ass about this.” Honestly, Arya doesn’t either. Either book him or let him go, she thinks, but she’s  _ not _ a cop so it’s not really her job to care, and Arya makes a point to not care about anything more than she absolutely has to.

“I’m not a cop, Lommy. Listen, just come with me to the station so we can reschedule and then you and I won’t have to see each other for another month,” she says, and then, “Ta,” when he fills her mug up with the freshly pressed coffee.

“I’ve got a client coming by in an hour.” He hops up on the counter beside her and takes one of the crullers as well, closing his eyes with a moan as he chews. “‘S good, right?”

“Heavenly,” she agrees, leaving the lid off her mug and blowing into the coffee to try to make it cool enough to drink. “That’s too early for clients. Call them and reschedule for the afternoon. Have you got honey? I bet this would be even better with warm honey drizzled on it.”

“No, but that does sound good. I’ll tell Pie about it. And I can’t reschedule for this afternoon, I’ve got another client later. You’re messing up my entire day, you know.”

Arya rolls her eyes. “Because I  _ definitely _ wanted to wake up at four in the morning to get on a bus and drag you across the city. That’s  _ absolutely _ how I wanted to start my day. I  _ love _ getting up out of bed and dealing with belligerent idiots.” She dunks the cruller into her coffee and lets out a groan of ecstasy when she eats it; Lommy gestures curiously and she angles the mug to him and holds it still while he dips his own pastry in.

“Speaking of, how’s Gen?” Lommy asks, mouth full, as he hops off the counter. He’s still in soft cotton pajamas, but he starts shedding clothes as he walks and Arya spies his bare rear as he rounds the corner of the kitchen to head to his bedroom.

“Working on a new piece,” she hollers so he can hear her. Gendry’s moved on to painting and hasn’t been thrilled with the results so far; he’s trying to do the nude figure in grayscale with watercolor, and the paint isn’t cooperating as well as acrylic, which is what he’s used to. Mostly it’s just messy, but he seems to be having fun when he’s not frustrated by it. “You won’t like this one, it’s got titties in it.” Lom has purchased some of Gendry’s work before, and is probably his most frequent customer-- Arya had passed one of his paintings and a couple framed sketches between the front door and the kitchen alone.

“I like titties!” Lommy yells defensively from his bedroom.

“Lady titties!” she clarifies with a shout.

“Oh. Nevermind, then.”

Arya rolls her eyes and picks up another cruller. When Lommy comes wandering back a minute or so later, now dressed and texting on his expensive tablet-sized phone, she slides off the counter and shoves the now half-empty box back into the fridge and twists the lid onto her mug. “Is your customer pissed off?” she asks, nodding towards his phone, and he shrugs.

“Didn’t actually have one. I just wanted you to leave. Should have known better.”

“Yeah, you should have. Hey, do you mind driving us? I really don’t want to ride on a bus again, and I sort of want to shower the pot-stink off before I have to interact with the public.” She’s a lot less worried about interacting with people at the station; Ned will have just started his shift, and at this point most of the officers recognize Lommy by both sight and smell. Arya had specifically not showered this morning for the express reason that she didn’t want to waste water when she came back home and would inevitably have to shower again. She’s basically in pajamas herself, sweatpants and a Winterfell  _ Wolves _ shirt she’d stolen from Robb years ago that’s worn thin and soft with age. To the despair of her sister, Arya cares less about how she looks and more about how comfortable she feels, so at this point her wardrobe is mostly loose jeans and sweats and t-shirts pilfered from various men of her family that are at least two sizes too big. She’d pulled her hair back into a messy bun to try to hide some of the oil in it, since dry shampoo only gets a girl so far. She looks more like a college student going to a morning class than she does a bounty hunter.

Lommy doesn’t even mention his supposed restrictive astigmatism, just grabs his keys off the little keyring by the door and then locks it behind them. “Am I going to be able to drive if I’ve got cuffs on? Are you going to cuff me again?” She’d cuffed him last time, because she’d been a little hungover and very irritable and he hadn’t  _ shut up _ and wasn’t expecting it.

Arya sighs. “If you make me, yes.”

“You’re a class traitor,” he says once they’re on the elevator and riding down to the carport. “A right fascist. Putting down the working class for trying to earn a living.”

She nods agreeably. “All that and more, I know. Can we ride with the top down?” Lommy uses the key fob to unlock his car once they’ve stepped into the garage, and the shiny convertible beeps cheerily from his assigned parking spot close by.

The ride to the station is mostly quiet, the sound of the wind blowing past them drowning out any conversation they may have wanted to have. It whips away the last of her drowsiness, though does little to flatter her already rumpled appearance. She doesn’t really care, though; she doesn’t work for the KLPD so she doesn’t have to adhere to their dress code, and Ned’s already seen her looking worse. There’s nobody there she cares enough about to impress.

Ned looks like he feels as haggard as she did earlier, with dark circles under his eyes and his own cup of coffee at his desk. When she walks into the station with Lommy on her heels it’s quieter than the last time she’d been here with Sandor, the morning rush not quite having started yet; crime never sleeps, but she’s learned that sometimes it dozes. Ned looks up, and when he sees her he gives her a tired grin. “Hey, Arya,” he says, the same way he always does. He glances over her shoulder. “Hello, Mister Greenhands.”

“Hello, pig,” Lommy says, and Arya digs her elbow into his side as Ned raises an eyebrow.

“He’s also not a cop, you shithead,” she hisses. Ned just rolls his eyes and waves them through, but when Arya makes for the wide doors that lead deeper into the station he stops her.

“Try to keep him quiet about that, yeah?” he murmurs, leaning forwards. “Jaime pulled an all-nighter with our Braavosi friends and Bolton. Tensions are kinda high back there right now.” After a moment Arya nods, chewing on her lip, and then turns and flicks Lommy in the ear.

“Hear that? Mouth shut,” she says sternly, and he glares at her and rubs his ear, mumbling about police brutality (“I’m not a cop, Lommy.”) before nodding sullenly. It gets even quieter the further they go into the building; a different administrator is the one that handles receiving and body receipts, so they’ll take the appropriate measures to insuring Lommy’s pretrial check-in is rescheduled and making sure there isn’t a current warrant out for him for missing it last week. Arya would be surprised if there is, though-- Lommy’s so well-known to the KLPD at this point that she’s sure whatever paperwork that was supposed to be completed when he didn’t show up was conveniently misplaced, just like last month’s. All she has to do is escort him back there, and then her job (that she still isn’t getting paid for until he actually goes to trial or is officially pardoned) is done. Peck, the receiving admin on duty, gives her a weary wave and Lommy an even wearier nod.

“Hullo, Lom,” he says, already typing on his keyboard with one hand and pulling paperwork out of his drawer with the other.

After a moment, Arya stomps on Lommy’s foot and he flinches and grinds out, “Hello, Peckledon.” He’s not exactly polite, but it’s better than she’d have thought to hope for.

Peck turns his droopy eyes to Arya and says pointedly, “You brought him in later than usual.”

“I was on vacation,” she shrugs, taking another sip from her coffee mug.

“Where you on vacation when you went out for drinks with half the detectives on the force a few days ago?”

She shrugs wider and more expansively. “Sure, why not? Maybe I was hoping someone would actually arrest him this time.”

Lommy sends her a wounded look. “I share my crullers and give you my coffee, and this is how you repay me.”

Peck slides some paperwork across the desk towards Lommy. “If you could fill--”

“Yeah, yeah, I know the drill,” he says, taking the stack and moving to sit down in a nearby chair with the familiarity of someone who’s done this once a month for a couple years.

Peck shakes his head and then looks enviously at Arya’s coffee mug. “I would kill you for that coffee right now.”

She smiles at him and takes a sip, even though by now it’s cooled considerably and is nearly down to dregs. “You could try. How long will this take?”

“Normally about an hour, but at this point Mister Greenhands and I have it down to a science. Have a seat if you like, we’ll be done soon.”

Arya goes to do that, but then Ramsay Bolton slimes his way around a corner, a look of fury in his colorless eyes, and she nopes the hell out. “Lommy I’ll wait for you out front okay see you soon bye,” she says quickly. She fairly jogs back towards the front lobby before Ramsay turns that pale deathmask of a face towards her. Ramsay is fun to joke with Ned about, but much, much less fun to interact with, and if Arya has to speak to him then she’s going to do it with Sandor around to have the buffer of a giant scarred man between them. She's not convinced that Bolton isn't a cannibal.

She stops at the break room on her way back to the front and lets herself in, leaving the door open behind her so she can watch in case Lommy finishes up early and walks by; they never lock the door, and she’s not technically an employee but she also doesn’t see any of them arresting her for trespassing. She’s well known as ex-detective Clegane’s pet by now, and she knows there’s some bets going around the force of when she’ll go into the academy and become an officer herself.  _ Never _ , she thinks but doesn’t say, but she’ll drink their coffee as long as they’ll let her. There’s about half a pot left, and still warm too, and Arya cheerfully refills her mug without feeling a lick of guilt. It’s not  _ nearly _ as good as the freshly-pressed coffee from Lommy’s, but it’s about as good as can be expected for instant.

She drops into a seat at the little table, kicking up her feet into another chair and leaning back, fiddling with her phone and thinking about her errands for the day. After this she should call Tyrion; the office will be open by the time she’s finished up and seen Lommy home, and she needs to see if there’s a contract she can pick up that’ll actually pay her. If not, she’ll call Sandor and ask if he’s got something to share. And if that’s a bust, well, then she’s got a day off and she and Nymeria can go to the park. Maybe Gendry can leave the garage early and they can try that new dog bar that opened up on the Hook. Or they can go back to binging The Great Westerosi Bake Off, or pug some people for the Destiny raid that dropped while she was at the Wall since he’s still gearing up his Titan.

Her musing is cut off by the sound of footsteps coming down the hall; she thinks for a brief moment that maybe Lommy’s done, but not enough time has passed, and there are two people talking to each other. She can’t understand what they’re saying and can’t puzzle out why, before realizing with a little thrill that they’re speaking Braavosi. Nobody on the force that she knows of speaks Braavosi.  _ Faceless Men _ , she thinks to herself, and feels herself grin.  _ Holy shit _ . She hunkers down in her seat, mug close to her face, and keeps one eye on the open door frame.

What if they’re in, like, robes? In tv shows and movies and shit they’re always in robes, grey or black and white. Well, they’re in robes if they’re the villains. If they’re protagonists then they usually wear sharp fancy suits, like in the James Bond movies. Or is that backwards? Do the villain Faceless wear suits? Was the Faceless Man in the Bond movie a villain or a protagonist? Maybe she should ask the ones here, they’d probably know. Do Faceless Men actually have little wrist knives strapped to bracers that they wear constantly? Arya knows these are absolutely ridiculous questions, but they’re fun to consider, and she hopes there’s at least  _ something _ abnormal about them so she can tell Gendry about it later. If there isn’t and they just look like regular people, she decides she’ll make something up. She’ll probably never actually meet them, after all. The voices are getting louder now, one male and one female just like Jaime had said that night they all went out for drinks, and Arya blinks in confusion, because the man sounds  _ familiar _ , a smile in his voice, in a way she can’t really place.

When they walk past the open door they’re only visible for a few seconds, but it only takes those few seconds for Arya’s heart to stop in her chest.

That was Jaqen. Jaqen just walked by the breakroom of the KLPD. Jaqen, speaking Braavosi and smiling at a tiny woman with blonde hair. If Arya hadn’t been staring intently at the door she wouldn’t have seen it, but she  _ was _ , so she  _ did _ , and it was  _ Jaqen _ . A handful of coincidences jump out at her, things she hadn’t given thought to consider together: Jaqen’s standoffish attitude towards talking about his job; that sharp feeling of  _ assessment _ on the plane, cold and calculating and how even then she knew that were was something  _ more _ to him than what she could see on the surface, how some animal instinct looked at him and whispered in her heart  _ that man is a threat _ ; Jaime’s ginger Lorathi who always smiled.

Jaqen, the hot nerd she’d shared a plane ride with and then spent a night and a morning screwing into oblivion, who read historical fiction books from thrift stores for fun and used emoticons when he texted and got insulted when her stupid dog wouldn’t let him pet her, was a  _ Faceless Man _ .

“Oh gods,” Arya says weakly. “Oh, fuck me.” He’d walked past the open door without even glancing inside the room, so at least she was alone in her revelation that her one night stand from Harrenhal was apparently now working in a building she came to frequently with  _ Sandor _ . Gods, and Jaime was working with Jaqen;  _ Jaime Lannister _ was working with a guy who’d had his cock up her twat. Abruptly, Arya dissolves into shrill, nervous giggling. “Oh gods,” she breathes again.  _ Jaime Lannister _ , who still called her  _ kiddo _ and  _ ruffled her hair _ when they went out for drinks, was  _ working _ with a guy who’d  _ given her stubble-burn on her cunt _ .

Arya runs her fingers through her messy hair, disrupting her bun and pulling half of it out. She redoes it with shaky hands. Oh  _ gods _ and she’s in  _ sweats _ . And not cute sweats either, but baggy grey ones that make her look even more formless than usual. And she’s not wearing a bra again, what if they run into each other and he takes one look at her and can tell she’s not wearing a bra?

Trembling, Arya pushes away her coffee and then takes out her phone.

**TO [Shireen]** :  _ my hot onenight stand is a faceless man, send help _

She doesn’t expect a reply, given how early it is, but she still gets one almost instantly; Shireen must be awake and getting ready for work.

**FROM [Shireen]** :  _ What, like in the James Bond movies? _   _Devan's dad loves those._ _Was he wearing a big ugly robe?_

And then, immediately after,

**FROM [Shireen]** :  _ Does this mean you sat on a Faceless Man’s face? Is that like a logic puzzle? _

Arya lets out an astonished bark of laughter. She spends a few minutes  _ dithering _ , but suddenly there’s a restless energy in her entire body and she needs to  _ go _ , now, needs to get up and  _ move _ . A jog, she thinks; definitely a jog. She’ll use that leash that wraps around her waist like a belt and take Nymeria out for a run and she won’t stop running until she collapses and maybe after she collapses she’ll just let Nymeria drag her around for a while like the worthless lump she is.

When she passes Ned at the front lobby, he stops her with a wave, and whatever he’d been about to say dies on his lips. “Are you alright, Arya?” he asks, concerned. “You look a mess.”

“I am!” she agrees brightly. “A mess! A huge mess! Gotta go! Bye!” And then she leaves, ignoring whatever he says next. She doesn’t need to get a bus, she decides, she can just run home. It’s not that far and she’s got the energy for it. She pauses briefly at the front door to send a text to HP to have him tell Lommy she’d had to leave, bouncing in place anxiously as she types, and for the second time in about five minutes her heart stops beating as someone, someone  _ familiar _ , says her name.

“Arya?”

She screws her eyes shut, cursing quietly, before turning slowly to where Jaqen and the tiny blonde woman lean against the outside of the building where Jaime always takes his smoke breaks. Jaqen has a cigarette between his fingers that he seems to have forgotten about as he stares at her in surprise. The woman, thin and waif-like, glances between the two of them with her eyebrows raised. After a moment Jaqen’s expression shutters and he steps towards her, his eyes calm and calculating and  _ suspicious _ , that  _ assessing _ look of a predator, that sharp stare that had come and gone so quickly on the plane when she’d been making very accurate observations towards what she now knows to be a very  _ inaccurate _ conclusion. “That a man and a girl would meet here is most… serendipitous,” he says quietly, and cooly, and utterly lacking in the affection he’d spoken to her with before.

It takes some effort, but she manages to bully her face into making some approximation of a smile. “Wow! Hey, you. Small world, huh?”

“Indeed,” Jaqen says, still with no inflection. “Small world. He would call how many times they've met unexpectedly surprising coincidence, if he believed in coincidence. But since he doesn't, he wonders what has caused this.”

“Fate?” she offers with a sardonic laugh. Jaqen just stares at her, unblinking and blank-faced, almost expectant.

Arya realizes abruptly that he’s  _ questioning _ her. No, more than that. He’s  _ threatening _ her. There’s that split second, the one she knows so well and loves so much from work: that razor’s edge of fight or flight. If he’s a Faceless Man, then he’s here from Braavos to take over the Hoat case. He could have been lying about work in Maidenpool, but he was certainly in Harrenhal for something, and in the North for something before that. Hoat is a dangerous criminal who keeps managing to stay one step ahead of the law.  _ He thinks I’m following him _ , she concludes after a moment.

She stares at him, at the disquieting expressionlessness of him, and then laughs. She laughs so hard that she snorts unattractively, and when he blinks in sudden confusion she laughs even harder. Two weeks ago he had his head between her thighs and his fingers up her cunt and she’d texted Sandor about it by mistake, and it’s  _ hilarious _ . She and Gendry were so childishly excited to have Faceless Men at the KLPD because of a stupid video game and it turned out to be  _ him _ , and it’s  _ hilarious _ . He’d accidentally called Brienne a man and had to apologize for it, which Arya knows because Jaime was bitching about him over beers, and it’s  _ hilarious _ .

The tiny waif-like woman says something in Braavosi, a question in her voice, and Jaqen turns to look at her with a confused shrug, and it’s  _ hilarious _ .

“Oh my gods,” she says. And then, “Okay so, admittedly, this is weird.” She pauses, bites her lip, then laughs again. “Are you  _ actually _ a Faceless Man?” And, borrowing one of Lommy’s favorite lines, “If you are then you legally have to tell me or it’s entrapment.”

Jaqen’s eyebrows draw down in bemusement and the waif behind him asks another question that he shrugs an answer to. Turning back to Arya, he says wryly, “That’s not how that works.”

“Well honestly, I’m starting to doubt that you’re a writer,” she tells him, crossing her arms. After a moment he smiles as well, a tiny grin that looks like it’d forced out of him. “Gods this is weird,” she says again. “This is weird, right?”

He nods. “Yes, it’s weird.”

Arya waves at the woman still leaning against the wall who’s watching them with mild curiosity. “Hello! I’m Arya.”

The waif looks between her and Jaqen again and then says something in Braavosi.

“Ah, right,” Arya says with a wince. “Jaime said she didn’t speak Common.”

Jaqen frowns down at her. “A girl knows a detective?” He then seems to remember the cigarette in his hand because he takes a quick pull and then drops it to the ground and grinds the embers beneath the heel of his boot.

“A girl knows several detectives. She  _ didn’t _ know that you smoked.”

At that he actually winces and scratches at the back of his neck. “This man does not often. He and his sister have had a long night.” His frown returns and he narrows his eyes at her, that calculating look crossing his face again. “How did a girl come to this place?”

“I’m a bail bondsperson,” she says, “I work here, kind of.” And then she points at him in delight, eyes wide. “Wait! Can you actually change your face like in the movies?”

Jaqen frowns harder, a twinge of annoyance at the corner of his mouth.  _ The anti-dimple _ , she thinks, and then snorts again because of the absurdity of it all. “No. A myth only.” Then, with disbelief, “A girl is a  _ bounty hunter? _ ”

“It  _ is _ technically commission work. And we prefer bail bondsperson,” Arya corrects. “We're professionals.”

He nods slowly, then gives a very long, very pointed look to her attire, and Arya feels herself flush red. “This morning I was a sleepy professional,” she says primly, raising her chin.

The waif behind Jaqen finally deigns to approach, eyebrow raised. As she does, Arya is inordinately pleased to realize that she’s got a couple inches on the blonde, and the waif has to tip her head up to look at her. She says some in Braavosi again, and Jaqen grimaces before replying; Arya hears her name amidst the babble and assumes she’s being introduced. “Arya,” he says, turning back to her after a moment, “this is a man’s partner,” and then he says something that she assumes is a name, but is absolutely  _ incomprehensible _ . 

“Bless you,” Arya says on instinct. Jaqen blinks at her and tilts his head slightly. “It’s an Old Gods thing,” she explains, her voice getting weaker with embarrassment as she continues, “you say it… when.... people sneeze….”

The waif looks up at Jaqen, apparently waiting for a translation, and he winces before speaking to her in Braavosi again. She gives him an eyeroll, and then bows her head in a nod at Arya, and thankfully they are saved from having to continue the mortifying interaction by Jaime Lannister, who exists the building with Lommy literally in tow; Jaime has him by the sleeve and is dragging him out. Upon seeing Arya, Jaime looks relieved and then shoves Lommy towards her. “You lost this,” he tells her, and Lommy sends him a supremely offended look as he rights his clothes.

“I’m a taxpaying citizen,” Lommy snaps, “and you don’t have a right to manhandle me! What’s your badge number? I know Chief Selmy  _ personally _ and I’m sure he would  _ love _ to--”

“Lommy,” Arya says, “just go get in the car before you’re actually arrested, please.”

He huffs and turns away from them (after giving Jaqen a brief appreciative glance that Arya makes a mental note to tell HP about later), and Arya crosses her arms over her chest and glares after him. Once he’s down the street and heading towards the public lot they’d parked his convertible in Arya looks back at Jaime, who’s fishing his own pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his jacket, because he’s a  _ southroner _ and he gets  _ cold _ in  _ spring _ . “Can you just arrest him next time, actually? It would make my life easier.”

Jaime smiles winningly at her, then turns to Jaqen and the waif. “Ah! I see you’ve met our Braavosi friends,” he says. “Shall I introduce you? Or…”

“No need,” Jaqen hums. He’s watching Arya appraisingly; the warmth that had started to return to his voice and expression has leaked out again. She grimaces internally. Of course this probably makes things complicated for them. His face is bland, lips curled in a half-smile with no substance behind it, no indication of familiarity. The amount of control he has over his expression is astounding. Arya wonders for a moment if this is why he and his colleagues are called Faceless. After a moment he looks away from her and to Jaime. “This man thinks we should get back to work. A coroner said his results would be in around this time, and this man is eager to be done.”

Jaime, who’s just lit up his smoke, lets out a little whine. “But I don’t  _ want _ to talk to Ramsay anymore,” he says petulantly, but nonetheless takes one long drag before stubbing the cigarette and putting what remains of it back in the box. “Back to the grind,” he tells Arya with a boyish shrug and a smile. He reaches out to ruffle her hair and she ducks away from him with a glare.

“A pleasure, Arya Stark,” Jaqen says mildly before going back into the building. The waif blinks wide dark eyes at Arya before following after him without a word, and Jaime visibly takes a deep fortifying breath and then leaves as well, waving to Arya over his shoulder.

Arya bites her lip, the rush of manic amusement she’d gotten out of the recent development fading and leaving her feeling a bit hollow in her gut. Well… that was disappointing.

 

* * *

 

That night, after she spends an afternoon dodging questions and eye contact, Gendry squints at her over his sandwich, chewing slowly. Arya is still determinedly not looking at him, picking at her own meal and ignoring the way Nymeria has her chin propped on the table between them, eyes flicking back and forth from their faces to their plates. Eating meals at the table is a habit that Arya carries with her from childhood, when her whole family would pile together at the dinner table; everyone had their own seats that they always sat in, and every night was a loud, messy affair as six different children tried to recount the events of their day and Ned and Cat indulgently attempted to listen to everything at once. (Gendry and his mother didn’t own a dinner table, they ate on trays in the living room in front of the television. It was novel, when she visited them as a kid-- it was different but the same, as she and Gendry would chatter over the noise of the TV and his mom would nod and smile. It felt more like home during the school year than having dinner with stupid, simpering  _ Sansa _ and her friends had.)

Of course, she and Gendry don’t eat at the table all the time. But it’s still important to her, in some stupid nostalgic way. Tonight, though, Arya just wishes she’d taken her food to her room. Or skipped eating entirely and gone straight to bed. Or, better yet, just crawled into the trash can outside to die like the dumpster child she truly is.

Gendry grunts. Arya pushes her food around her plate. Gendry grunts a bit louder. Arya pops her fork into her mouth. Gendry kicks her under the table. Arya lifts her head to glare at him.

“Finally,” he says when she does, “I thought I’d gone invisible or something. I don’t think you’ve acknowledged me since I got off work.” She rolls her eyes and props her elbow on the table, dropping her chin into her hand. “Hey.” When she looks back at him his expression is serious. “Did Lommy do something shitty? He’s harmless but he can be a real prick, and I’ll beat him up if you want me to.”

For the first time since she’d gotten home that morning, Arya gives him a genuine smile, even if it’s a little weak at the edges. “We both know that I would beat Lommy up before you would, Gendry.” He shrugs good-naturedly. She hesitates, then heaves a sigh. “No, it’s not Lommy. He was as annoying as usual, but manageable. Whatever.” She takes another bite and then says, mouth full, “I ran into Jaqen today. He’s one of the Faceless men working with the force on the Hoat case.”

Gendry inhales sharply in surprise, blue eyes wide as he stares at her. “Jaqen? The nerd one night stand?” Arya nods miserably. “Well. Okay then.” His brows furrow like he’s not sure how he feels about this revelation before prodding hesitantly, “And that’s… bad? Like, it’s fucking  _ awkward _ , yeah. But I thought you, you know.” And then he frowns lightly. “Liked him.”

“I did,” she says, eyes on her plate instead of him. “I mean, I do. He’s funny and kind of a doofus. Or, I guess I thought he was. When we talked earlier at the station, he was just really, like. Standoffish. Not even like in a professional way, but… I don't know. Like we were complete strangers.”

“You kind of are,” Gendry points out. Arya doesn’t know how to argue the idea that you can’t be  _ complete _ strangers with someone once you’ve had their tongue shoved up your genitals, but Gendry is clearly trying to be chill about this and provoking him isn’t something she feels like dealing with right now.

“He sent me dumb dog poetry,” she argues weakly, but then shrugs with a sigh. “I mean, it doesn’t really matter in the end, huh? We weren’t even like  _ flirting _ over text or anything. I didn't want to, you know.  _ Date _ him. He was just fun to talk to sometimes. No huge loss.” She forces a smile, but judging by the frown on Gendry’s face he’s not buying it. “I’m disappointed and a little embarrassed,” she admits after a moment. “I’ll get over it.”

He frowns a little harder. “Anything I can do to help?”

_ Take my mind off of it _ , she almost says. Because he could. Gendry could make her forget for a while, about Jaqen and how embarrassing it is to realize she’d put more stock into their budding friendship than he had, how a little voice whispers in her head  _ Not good enough again, huh? _ Gendry could fuck her and it’d feel good, it’d feel familiar; it’s not always biting anger with them. They can be slow. They can be  _ good _ . They can be  _ so good _ . She misses that, sometimes.

But that wouldn’t be fair to him. Or to her, really. They don’t do that anymore. When they have sex now it’s angry, or drunk, or because they’re both horny and have nothing better to do. They don’t do slow and sweet and good. Because that would open doors to  _ expectations _ .

Arya doesn’t like when people expect things of her; she likes to do the  _ opposite _ of what’s expected. She likes control. She’s disappointing, and she knows that, so she’ll be disappointing on her own terms and nobody else’s.

“Destiny?” she asks instead, and Gendry smiles at her. After they finish eating he turns on his Xbox and she boots up her laptop and they do a couple Strikes together. He tells her some stupid story about his boss and she laughs, and they have a few beers while they play, and he goes to bed first and he stops to hug her before he leaves.

“Sorry the Faceless Men suck,” he tells her. She smiles up at him and gives a little shrug.

“Lots of people suck,” she says. “Shouldn’t have been surprised over it.”

He squeezes the back of her neck lightly, the way he used to before he’d lean in and kiss her forehead, the way he does now when he’s thinking about leaning in and kissing her forehead but won’t. After he goes to bed she lets Nymeria out into the backyard, small as it is, and leans against the doorframe as the pup paces, trying to decide which of the five square feet available she wants to pee in, when her phone buzzes in her hand.

Arya hesitates, then checks the screen. It's  _ him _ . After a minute, during which time Nymeria has already peed and then breezed past her through the open door and back into the house, Arya opens the message.

**FROM [A Man]** :  _ He apologizes. It was… unexpected. This man had not anticipated running into a girl today. His reaction was poor form. He understands if you do not wish to speak again, he will respect your decision. But if you like, he found another poem that reminded him of you. _

“Bastard,” she grumbles quietly. How dare he use her curiosity against her.

Arya goes back into the house, heads to her room and changes into pajamas. She nudges Nymeria, already on the bed, to the other side of the mattress and lays down. She plugs her phone in, makes sure her alarm is set for the morning, and then turns off the light. Then, she texts him back.

**TO [A Man]** :  _ what poem? _

It takes less than a minute for him to reply with a photo attachment. The same as the other, it’s a picture of a page in a book, zoomed in so only one paragraph is visible.

_ (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) _

_ Someone I loved once gave me _

_ a box full of darkness. _

_ It took me years to understand _

_ that this, too, was a gift. _

She Googles it, but that’s all there is. Not an excerpt from a longer poem. Just that. Arya doesn’t reply, but neither does she sleep; not for a long, long time.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, she rolls over, turns off her alarm, and texts:

**TO [A Man]** :  _ Do you guys actually wear big ugly robes or is that just in movies and shit _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there is copious amounts of handwaving in terms of my explanation of legality and bounty hunting. i did as much research for this as i felt necessary, which means until i got bored. i squeeze dog butts for a living. i'll write things that make coherent sense when i'm paid to do it.
> 
> also in this universe you can play destiny cross platform, i guess.
> 
> first poem was a dog has died, by pablo neruda. second one was the uses of sorrow, by mary oliver.


End file.
